The digital lifeline must not be left to chance
Internet access has evolved from being a luxury to becoming the very backbone of modern society. Today, a person might willingly skip a meal, but the thought of losing an internet connection for even a moment is met with panic. It is no longer just about entertainment or social media; it is about livelihood, education, healthcare, and commerce. It is the pulse of the nation’s economy.
This reality makes the current debate regarding Bangladesh’s future international bandwidth supply a matter of critical national security. We have a situation where private sector stakeholders are sounding alarm bells, projecting a severe capacity crunch as early as 2028, while the state-owned monopoly, Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company PLC (BSCPLC), dismisses these fears as "misleading and divorced from reality."
When the state’s official machinery and the private sector offer completely opposite versions of the future, it creates a fog of uncertainty. However, given the high stakes, the government cannot afford to sit back and assume the state agency is correct simply because it is the state. A neutral, thorough, and independent assessment is required immediately. The cost of being wrong is simply too high.
The numbers presented by the private sector are not random guesses; they are projections based on explosive growth. In 2013, the country used just 50 Gbps. By 2026, that number has exploded to 13.5 Tbps. That is a 260-fold increase in thirteen years. The forecast suggests a demand for nearly 27 Tbps by 2028 and up to 54 Tbps by 2030. While BSCPLC counters by citing its existing unused capacity and the upcoming SEA-ME-WE 6 cable, the core issue is about time, redundancy, and the fragility of relying on a single supplier.
We must look at this issue not from the perspective of corporate profits or state-entity pride, but from the perspective of national resilience. The first point of concern is the geography of our connectivity. Bangladesh, a nation of 170 million people driving a rapidly digitizing economy, relies primarily on only two submarine cables: SEA-ME-WE-4 and SEA-ME-WE-5. To put this in perspective, India is connected to 19 cables, Malaysia to 23, and the Philippines to 19. This disparity is alarming.
Submarine cables are prone to faults—whether from underwater earthquakes, dragging ship anchors, or technical failures. If one of Bangladesh's two aging cables suffers a major fault, the other alone cannot sustain the current demand, let alone future growth.
We saw the panic that ensued in other regions when cables were severed; for a nation so dependent on the internet, a lack of redundancy is a gamble with the national economy. BSCPLC assures us that SEA-ME-WE-6 will solve the problem by adding 34,000 Gbps of capacity by 2027.
While this is a welcome development, it still does not erase the vulnerability of having a "single point of failure" in the overall architecture. Furthermore, SEA-ME-WE-4 is scheduled to be decommissioned by 2030. This means that by the time we think we have solved the crisis, we will be retiring the very infrastructure that currently holds us together. The second concern is the bottleneck of bureaucracy.
The private consortium warns that planning, financing, and constructing a submarine cable takes years. If we wait until 2027 to see if the demand matches the supply, we have already lost. If the private sector is wrong and BSCPLC is right, we lose nothing by approving private cable projects now. However, if the private sector is right and BSCPLC is wrong, the country descends into a digital dark age characterised by slow speeds, high costs, and economic stagnation.
There is a suspicion in some quarters that the private investors are merely lobbying for their own financial interests. That may be true. They are businesses, after all, and they seek profit. However, their profit motive does not invalidate their data. The government should not reject a solution simply because a private company will make money from it. We do not ask private power producers to operate for free; we welcome their investment to solve the electricity crisis. Why should the internet be any different?
Allowing private submarine cables is not a concession to corporate greed; it is a strategy to diversify risk. Competition in the international bandwidth market would lower prices for consumers and create a safety net. Currently, the country is heavily reliant on BSCPLC and a few International Terrestrial Cable (ITC) operators. If BSCPLC faces technical or financial difficulties, the nation suffers. A diversified portfolio, including privately owned cables, would make the internet ecosystem more robust.
BSCPLC’s rebuttal pointed to "unused capacity" of 3,200 Gbps.
However, looking at the trend of the last decade, that buffer will be consumed rapidly. The government''s own plan to bring 7 crore feature-phone users under mobile data services within the next year will consume a massive chunk of that "spare" capacity. We are talking about adding tens of millions of new users to the network. When that happens, the demand curve will not be linear; it will be exponential. This brings us to a more profound issue: trust and accountability.
Too often, state entities deny problems until they become unmanageable, before finally admitting the crisis. We saw this pattern in the banking sector and the energy sector. The public was reassured for years that everything was fine, only to be hit by crippling crises later. The current government is well aware of the political volatility of internet shutdowns.
The previous government’s decision to shut down the internet resulted in massive economic losses and a severe blow to its legitimacy.
The public can tolerate load shedding of electricity, they complain, but they cope. They cannot and will not tolerate an internet crisis. If the country descends into a bandwidth shortage in 2028 or 2029, the anger will not be directed at undersea cables or technical faults; it will be directed at the government.
Therefore, a humble plea to the authorities is to treat this not as a technical issue for the telecom ministry, but as a sovereign issue. It is a matter of "digital sovereignty." We cannot allow our digital future to be decided solely by a single state-owned company that has a vested interest in maintaining its monopoly. An independent audit of the bandwidth demand projections is necessary. The Prime Minister’s Office should convene a high-level meeting involving BTRC, BSCPLC, the private consortium, and independent international consultants.
The goal should not be to prove who is right, but to find out what is true. The digital highway is as critical to Bangladesh as its physical roads and bridges. We would not leave the construction of a major bridge solely to a single company without scrutiny.
The internet is the bridge to the global economy. It is time to set aside the ego of state agencies and the suspicions regarding private investors. It is time to plan for the worst, hope for the best, and build a network that can sustain the dreams of Bangladesh digitally. The time to act is now. If we wait for the crisis to arrive, it will be too late to build the ship.
* Naim-Ul-Karim Sanchaya, Special correspondent & in-charge at Xinhua News Agency’s Dhaka Bureau office.
* The writer is a journalist and opinions expressed are solely his own and don’t express the views or opinions of his employer.