“Broadband Internet service through the optical fibre is essential to ensure quality ICT services and that is why the government has decided to install optical fibre network across the country,” current BTRC chair and the then posts and telecommunications secretary Sunil Kanti Bose told the national news agency in late 2011. This US$68 million project to deploy 11,060 kilometers of fiber to link 1,000 Union Parishad (smallest administrative unit) was approved last year. ROI of this scheme remains equally illusive.

Slashing the wholesale price of submarine cable’s bandwidth by 50% through executive order doesn’t bring good news for the consumers. Because, payment to the middleman, aka NTTN, increases the cost of reaching the cable landing station at Cox’s Bazar. The BTRC, for obvious reasons, ignores the damage being done by the NTTNs.