A mobile internet outage has been reported in the capital’s Naya Paltan area, where opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is holding a grand rally with the participation of hundreds of thousands of leaders and activists for the government's resignation.
The BNP men alleged that the mobile handsets in the area are mostly now disconnected from the internet. Some mobile phones are displaying an internet signal, but the users are failing to browse the internet.
The newspersons covering the grand rally also came up with similar complaints and said they are facing hurdles to perform their professional duties due to the lack of internet service.
The BNP rally began at 2:00 pm on Thursday, but the venue was seen packed to the brim with leaders and activists four hours before its commencement.
There has been no mobile internet service since 12:00 pm.
Aktarul Amin, an activist of BNP’s student wing Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal, came to the rally from Uttara in Dhaka. He complained that he had not been able to connect to the internet on his mobile phone since arriving at the venue.
A temporary media centre has been installed on two pickup vans at the venue to help the newspersons cover the programme.
At the media centre, some reporters alleged that they could not send video footage of the BNP rally directly to their offices due to the lack of internet access. They resorted to memory cards as an alternative means of data transmission.
The authorities now provide high-speed 4G internet service across the country. If the service is lowered to 2G, the users can only talk over the phone and cannot access high-speed internet.
The high-speed internet service may get disrupted if a large number of people gather at a place, causing strain on the mobile network operator's normal capacity.
The previous BNP rallies had also witnessed similar internet outages.
However, there is no official explanation from the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) for the internet outage. The mobile network operators also declined to make any comment on their disrupted service.
BNP secretary-general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir had earlier alleged that the government is using the BTRC to suppress the people.