NT Chautari Logo

Nepal Telecom had announced to launch a Facebook like Social Networking site called “Chautari” (चौतारी – meaning a shade tree) in order to overcome the loss of excessive bandwidth that Nepalese Facebook users are creating. Facebook has continuously been in top #1 most visited website in Nepal for the last 3 years, and according to checkfacebook.com a complete internet population (100% of internet users) in Nepal use facebook. This can give us a vivid idea about the bandwidth, a Facebook bandwidth in use.

The server of Chautari will be in Nepal obviously, in NTC’s office and is supposed to drastically reduce the bandwidth consumption. However, will Chautari suffice the need of the present Facebook users in Nepal. Even after nearly a half year of the announcement, there is no progress in Chautari. Users are supposed to access Chautari from http://chautari.ntc.net.np/ a sub-domain within NTC’s site rather than a separate domain. Still the website chautari.ntc.net.np says “website is under construction”. This has created just a hoax, given how Nepalese offices work (do they work?).

Chautari is supposed to have almost every facility that Facebook has (we doubt what about periodic new updates from Facebook?) like chat, friends, groups, sharing photos and videos. One highly claimed feature of Chautari, the Facebook like website from Nepal, is the ability to send free SMS daily (limited to 10) to any mobile number inside the country. The initial phase is to accommodate the capacity of 10 lakh users.

The question now is: how long will NTC experiment the testing phase of Chautari within the NTC employee? What about their developers and social media experts? Seems like everything is going anonymous. Here is a screenshot from Nepali Facebook, oops Chautari; what it looks like.

NTC Chautari showing user profile page like in Facebook, but the design looks prototype

Lately Nepal Telecom (NTC) added an additional 3GB bandwidth but that has also been rapidly consumed by facebook due to which the internet has become very slow. The server location of Facebook has to be blamed for this, currently Facebook users in Nepal browse from Facebook servers in the US, and in India (since last few months only), same is the case with Nepalese twitterers. Facebook has also been banned in many Nepalese Government office and in the NTC office (?) itself. The recent installation of Google Cache servers in Nepal Telecom premises is giving an easy breathing to YouTube users now, saving a monstrous bandwidth to be sent outside of the country.