A project let down due to lack of motivation

At their personal initiative, a foursome from the DU had developed an interfacing system, which could receive the message from the end user and transfer them to email accounts through their server.

What they needed were basically a cell phone and a data cable for the purpose of transferring the messages into a Linux server and from there to the email account of the desired person. Shah Mostafa Khaled, a third year student of DU told this reporter about their project, which initially happened to be successful in its area but could not find any support from the commercial organisations. He also mentioned, due to lack of finance it became difficult to support the technology as the user response they were receiving during the SSC result publication, was very high and a single mobile phone interface could not handle the load, but had there been a mobile phone operator, there would have been a dedicated server for this purpose which could have done the job swiftly.

The process included an end user mobile phone connecting to the mobile phone operator server that transferred the message to another end user mobile phone which happened to be the interface routing the message into another server which delivered the message to the destination email account. In this regard the students used Assembly Visual Basic and C++ to read the messages, which were formatted using Java and C++ to set the frame and packets that were maintained in a database built on Visual Basic and later on sent via a Linux Server on Java platform.

The problem these students had faced were lack of cooperation from the mobile phone operators who, if wanted, could provide them the support for an assessment. "In other countries, it is the organisations and universities who jointly encourage the students in developing such projects, which if served the purpose were purchased later on by the organisations", said Khaled from his personal knowledge he acquired from his relative who is a professor of a university in Malaysia.

Local implementation of software reduces the cost of operation and thus the call charge and usage price but purchasing a service from outside makes it expensive, which may not be affordable for everyone. On the other hand, this tech prodigy (Khaled) also admitted that companies prefer to purchase established and tested products because there is reliability, which a team of students cannot ensure.

Only a few days back Pacific Bangladesh Telecom Limited had provided a platform for the CSE students of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Buet) to develop software for Bangla SMS, which happened to be a success and later on initiated by CityCell.