Year: 2010

Well, in one of my earlier posts, I wrote on how you can use Moneybookers to transfer your online earnings safely to your DBBL bank account. The post got popular and many people were inspired, I believe. Moneybookers is indeed a very cost effective solutions for Bangladeshi free lance workers who are working online on different free lance sites/agencies like Scriptlance, Freelancer or oDesk. Moneybookers charges only $2.32 to transfer any amount to Bangladesh. But the situation worsened when some of the readers notified me about the high transfer fees which were applied to some transactions. I was also charged extra than the usual Moneybookers fees. I was surprised. Looking up the transaction gave me information that the money was passed through a bank in Germany. They charged around 12 EURO as a bank wire transfer fee! No doubt, I was damn unhappy! I was not the only one. Apparently most of the Bangladeshi moneybookers users ceased to withdraw cash via them.

I was not out of luck or helpless with Moneybookers. Rumman vaiya (my partner at JOTIL21) had a verified paypal account linked to his canadian bank account. He’s a canadian citizen. I used to transfer a lot of my earnings via him. But I was feeling very guilty to disturb him every now and then. On the other hand, I didn’t want to go for Payoneer debit card, since I hardly do any free lance projects these days. I need to receive money from my employer. So, I decided to knock MB customer care.

I sent them an email regarding the extra charges. They responded 6-7 hours later. They mentioned for some reasons, the transactions were processed in EUR. Thats the reason, I got charged extra! They also claimed that the issue was resolved now and they’ll charge the normal rate afterwards. Here’s the quote:

We would like to kindly inform you that your withdrawal has been sent out in EUR due to processing requirements. However, we have resolved the issues and again we process withdrawals in USD.

I was curious, I knocked them regarding why they were required to process the money in EUR. Here’s the heads up:

We appreciate your enquiry and would like to inform you that we have had processing issues with Standard Chartered bank which was processing our transactions in EUR. The situation has however been resolved and the transactions from your account will be processed in USD.

OK, so they claim that they had some sort of problem with the Standard Chartered Bank and they had to process the money via another bank. That makes sense! But they should have explicitly informed the users during the withdrawal. That would have helped us making an alternate decision or at least it would have made Moneybookers more credible as a money transfer solution!

The Problem: 😀

I am a Grameen Phone subscriber and I use their mobile broadband internet connection for my day to day purpose. But I need to manually connect to the internet either by using their suite or from the Network and Sharing tools. I want to automate the connection process so that whenever I log on, I get connected to GP-Internet without any hassle.

Additional Details: 🙂

Whenever I want to connect to GP Internet from Network and Sharing center (or from my system tray), I am prompted for the dial-up number. The number is automatically filled in, I just have to hit “connect”.

SOLUTION: 😀

Solution is pretty easy. We’re going to schedule a task on log on. Whenever I log on to my account, a task is executed. On Windows, we have a tool – “rasphone”. It connects to network connections. If you want to connect to a connection using this utility, just type “rasphone -d CONNECTION-NAME”. You can also type “rasphone” which will run the GUI. The GUI could be helpful to view the names of available internet connections. GP Internet users can rest assured that if they created their connection with the shipped “grameenphone internet” suite, the connection name is obviously “GP-INTERNET”. If you configured it manually or with another name, please look up the name.

Go to the connection properties, go to “Options” and uncheck the box that says – “Prompt for phone number”.

Now, to schedule the task, we need to go to : “Control Panel > System & Security”. Under “Administrative Tools”, go to “Schedule Task”. Select “Create basic task”. Now fill in the details. Select “When I log on” as the schedule event. The program name should be “rasphone”. Argument will be “-d GP-INTERNET”.

After you’ve setup the task, just restart and enjoy! You can use other dial up connections this way as well.