bid chronicles » wifi

Internet in Dhaka part 2

bidyut — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:21:15 +0000

Ok, so I was wrong about certain parts of my previous ramble. From my recent trip to BCS Computer City I can tell that even if the concept of a LAN is missing around my friend and family, it must be there somewhere in this city. I reason I claim this is mostly due to the tens of consumer grade routers being sold. Though as I mentioned before, many of these low-end consumer routers are being used to provide “cable internet” in many areas. There were even a variety of wireless access points, bridges and routers available, which points to the fact that WiFi must be in somewhere.

What was really interesting was to see the easy avaibility of ASUS, BenQ and LiteON products. Since these are all Asian brands the ease of importing them and their price points makes them a very promising supplier. I even noticed an ASUS EeePC amoung the variety of laptops that are readily available. Also it is much fun to see all the Chinese knock-offs that you can find

Internet in Dhaka

bidyut — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 05:48:30 +0000

Ah the internet then and now. Firstly let me admit to you that my life doesn’t work without a network. I need the internet. I’m probably addicted to it. But it’s not that I’m surfing everywhere and stuff. I’m just addicted to information, and there’s plenty of that online!

That aside, what I really wanted to tell you today was the changes in network technology in Bangladesh. What amazes me, is that WiFi hasn’t still hit mainstream in Bangladesh. Neither is LAN a big part of the culture. As you start looking deep into it, you realize that it doesn’t really make sense.

Besides spoilt brats like me, most people have only a computer at home. Prices of computers though cheap it isn’t cheap compared to other things. Most cases people cannot justify having more than 1 computer at home. What’s the point of a LAN at that moment? There’s one desktop with everything. What’s the point of having another power sucker running somewhere just to dish out a few files on the LAN.

As for Wireless is concerned, it’s pretty straight forward. Laptops cost a bundle to buy and tons more to maintain. On the other hand, desktops are pretty straight forward and tends to be a much cheaper for repairs. Swipe the bad card and wala! Simple, cheap and easy.

As for the internet itself, a lot has changed. Even though last time I was here cable internet was the big thing, what was actually happening was that the cost reduction was happening the same was as roommates would share internet. One guy gets the actual cable internet. He feeds it to his lovely router who dishes out 192.168.1.x IP address to all the people that guy sells the internet to. So what would happen is when everyone get online at the same time, the network would start to crawl. Not to mention the insane amount of firewall problems caused by the friendly router.

Nowadays, however, the playing field is very different. Shared cable internet has become dirt cheap while Wireless WAN has become the next big thing. EDGE modems are cheaper here than they are back in the USA and not to mention that you don’t have to sign your life away on a 2 year contract. Once you get past that hurdle, you can get 1Gb/month at a very reasonable price.

Granted it’s not HSDPA (3G) but hey we’re going WiMAX in a few month, baby! This is something I predicted 3 years back when I visited. It feels good to be right. Though it feels bad that I couldn’t be a big part of it. But hell. I still have time. May be I’ll bring LTE to Bangladesh at a later date

Technobabble

bidyut — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:33:01 +0000

This week I was faced with two counts of “whoosh”-over-the-head moments. First was when I was trying to explain to my friend that the streaming HD movie sometimes had a bandwidth requirement that WiFi failed to provide. The next was when I mentioned to my roomie’s sister that I got Prestige in Blu-ray.

This got me thinking. I’ve hit such a weird level of geekdom that I have forgotten that the world is not keeping up with all the techno-marvels the moment that they are coming out. Back in the day it took me about 4 years before getting in line with DVD, and now a mere 18 months later I have Blu-ray discs. Though I have to claim that owning Blu-ray had little to do with Blu-ray itself, but I digress.

Most of the people around me these days keep up with the latest. At best they have fallen behind for a month or so. Words like gigabytes, megabits per second, full-HD, etc. have become so common place that I forget that one might not be able to comprehend how big a 1GB file could be. Which in turn points to how I fail to realize what I geek I actually am sometimes.

Lesson learned. Next time I’ll know better.