Public funds of Tk16,000 crore were poured into a series of government connectivity projects meant to realise the Digital Bangladesh vision under the Awami League administration. Yet the outcome, according to the ICT white paper, is a network that the state neither fully controls nor fully benefits from.
Contracts, project designs, and operational decisions entrenched private monopolies, weakened public operators, and created long-term fiscal and sovereignty risks, according to the interim government’s white paper released last week.
It paints a stark picture—government-funded fibre networks intended to collapse distance and expand services to all 64 districts instead made the public sector dependent on private firms.
The Nationwide Telecommunication Transmission Network (NTTN) regime, introduced by the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission to separate backbone infrastructure from retail services, was meant to encourage competition by licensing both public and private operators.
Public entities included Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL), Bangladesh Railway, and Power Grid Company of Bangladesh, while private operators included Summit Communications and Fiber@Home. In total, they deployed 149,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cable nationwide.
In practice, licences were limited, and political patronage concentrated control.
Fiber@Home, licensed in 2008, now operates around 50,000 kilometres of the private network, followed by Summit Communications. Public operators failed to modernise or scale, leaving government-funded projects dependent on private NTTN infrastructure for upstream connectivity, redundancy, and operations.
“Dependency on private firms was built into project design,” the white paper states.
Between 2015 and 2024, the government financed multiple connectivity initiatives through the ICT Division and its implementing agencies, notably the Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC) and the Department of ICT.
These include Tk2,140 crore Info-Sarker Phase III in 2016–17, aimed at connecting 2,600 union councils with high-capacity fibre links. BCC laid 27,500 kilometres of fibre, established more than 2,600 Points of Presence (PoPs) at union level, and installed Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) equipment.
Yet PoPs were placed in rented private buildings, often co-located with private operator facilities, and DWDM equipment was integrated into private backbones, preventing independent public operation.
Connected Bangladesh, Establishing Digital Connectivity (EDC), BanglaGovNet, SASEC Information Highway, Digital Island Moheshkhali, and district-level fibre extensions collectively consumed the remaining Tk13,860 crore.
Info-Sarker III demonstrates the structural bias towards favoured private firms. By 2023, 20-year public–private partnership agreements transferred operational control to Summit Communications and Fiber@Home, allocating 90 per cent of revenue to private partners and only 10 per cent to the government.
Network Management System (NMS) logs and field inspections by the white paper team in Shibchar upazila, Madaripur, revealed bypass connections diverting traffic outside accounting systems, serving private clients without compensating the state.
Large-capacity fibre remains unused—idle and at risk of degradation.
Establishing Digital Connectivity exposed systemic corruption.
Designed to connect 109,000 public institutions, the project contracted 36 Internet Service Providers, with payments linked to NMS data. A forensic review found reused object IDs, repeated photographs, GPS coordinates that did not match listed locations, and implausible installation rates exceeding 700 connections per day.
Tk99 crore was disbursed for fake or unverifiable work. Pricing for 20Mbps connections was nearly double market rates, and installation charges were highly inflated.
Technical oversight collapsed as routers lacked monitoring, consultants bypassed controls, and contractors linked to politically connected networks benefited.
EDC also failed to route institutions through Info-Sarker PoPs, with ISPs sourcing bandwidth directly from private NTTN operators—violating project rules and depriving the government of revenue.
The Tk22.36 crore Digital Island Moheshkhali project, launched in 2017 to deliver e-services to a remote island, collapsed within two and a half years. Fibre was stolen, equipment deteriorated, and intended benefits never materialised. IMED inspections documented broken facilities and inactive centres.
Across projects, field inspections revealed engineering failures—dangerous mismatches between breakers and cables, oversized battery systems inflating costs, poor grounding, and absent redundancy—reflecting weak design, flawed demand forecasting, and the absence of independent engineering audits.
Institutional ambiguity compounded these failures. Telecommunications infrastructure legally falls under the Posts and Telecommunications Division, yet BCC, a promotional ICT agency, built nationwide fibre networks. Asset handovers were delayed, accountability fragmented, and BTCL—the statutory public operator—was sidelined.
By 2024, Bangladesh had achieved near-universal geographic connectivity. But public funds financed infrastructure operated by private monopolies, oversight failures enabled inflated costs and fake reporting, and strategic assets remained idle or misused.
“The state continues to pay high transmission costs to private upstream providers, while true control and public benefit remain unrealised,” the white paper warns.
Fifteen years on, the Digital Bangladesh vision has been delivered in fibre and bandwidth—yet the wires tell a cautionary tale of who invests, who controls, and who ultimately benefits.
