Staff Reporter :Showing security reasons, the government blocked popular internet calling and messaging services Viber and Tango on Sunday. Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission [BTRC] yesterday sent letters to the mobile phone operators and international internet gateway operators regarding the closure.”We have sent notices to several embassies in Dhaka informing that the service will be inactive from 12am, Sunday to 6pm. Later, the duration of the closure was extended till 12am on Monday,” Secretary of BTRC Sarowar Alam said.Grameenphone, the country’s largest mobile phone operator, in a statement yesterday said, “GP and the other mobile operators in Bangladesh received a written notice from BTRC to temporarily restrict access to the messaging service Viber and Tango for security reasons.” “We have received directive from the BTRC to block Viber and Tango. We have already disabled both the services from last midnight,” Zahir Ahmed, Managing Director of BanglaTel, an international terrestrial cable company, said last night. There is widespread speculation that the latest government move came following deadly violence during the ongoing nonstop blockade enforced by the BNP-led 20-party alliance across the country.Viber and Tango are two of the most popular and most widely used Voice over Internet Protocol [VoIP] apps that are used for making free text and calls through the internet among the smartphone users. Both Viber and Tango are available on iOS, Android and Windows Mobile platforms. Viber offers only free voice calls and SMS texts, but Tango supports both voice calls & video calls.Tango works almost on the same principle as that of Viber. It also does not require a lengthy registration process. When any user turns on the Tango app for the first time, it will need his mobile number as the username and then synchronize the address book of his smartphone to check which of the users are registered to the Tango database. According to the official website of Tango, this registration process is extremely fast and not supposed to take more than 5 seconds on an average speed of internet service.
