Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina yesterday officially launched the long-awaited dot bangla (.bangla) internet domain allowing web addresses to end with .bangla.

From today users can create and use dot bangla sites, which will be run by state-owned Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Ltd and it will be the technical contact point for the domain label.

Yesterday, in a ceremony at her official residence the Gono Bhaban, the prime minister launched the .bangla domain, which the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) allocated Bangladesh three months ago.

The ICANN domain for Bangladesh had been dotbd (.bd) since 2003 and already 36,500 websites use it. Dot bangla was added on October4 last year.

This kind of domain names makes it easier to identify a certain country's websites, for example; dot UK (.uk) websites belong to the United Kingdom.

Earlier, Indian state of West Bengal and Sierra Leone (one of whose official languages is Bangla) also asked for the .bangla domain and they would also receive another new domain label. And .bangla is Bangladesh's own Unicode domain label.

In the ceremony, Hasina expressed hope that the new domain would lead to an increase in ICT busi ness.

"Those who criticised the announcement of a Digital Bangladesh will now be able to use .bangla domains," said the PM.

State Minister for Telecom Tarana Halim also spoke at yesterday’s ceremony, while Information Minister Hasanul Haq Inu, Expatriates' Welfare and Overseas Employment Minister Nurul Islam, Shipping Minister Shajahan Khan, Railways Minister Mazibul Hoque, and Prime Minister's Advisers HT Imam and Iqbal Sobhan

Chowdhury were present.

After the program, Tarana said when she had taken office, she promised the .bangle domain and she did it after more than one year's of effort.

She said the new domain would make it easier for people to use the internet in Bangla and that the image of Bangladesh would be held high in the global arena.

Officials said the BTCL is to start accepting applications for the domain from today. They said customers could complete all procedures for .bangla domain names online while registration fee would be received using state-owned mobile phone operator Teletalk.

Domain names, such as "thedailystar.net", were originally designed only to support ASCII characters. In 2003, a specification was released that allows most Unicode characters to be used in domain names. All modern browsers and email applications support this, allowing people to use links in their native languages.

Therefore, users can go to the BTCL website (www.btcl.com.bd) by just typing btcl.bangla in Bangla fonts in their browsers.