For some time we have been pointing to the fact that , the Bay of Bengal is one of the least connected by cable despite being home to six of the world’s 10 fastest growing economies. Something is being done about it: a private company and the Bangladesh government’s undersea cable monopoly are entering into a joint venture to connect the landing point of SEA-ME-WE 4 in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and the capital of the Rakhine State in Myanmar. The private entity will own 90 percent of the cable, presumably because BSCCL could not come up with more money. It is a good thing, and meshes with the UN ESCAP vision of a Asia Pacific Information Superhighway (AP-IS) which is redundant and low cost. The cable will be 250 kilometres long and will connect Cox’s Bazar and Myanmar’s coastal city of Sittwe, said Monwar Hossain, managing director of BSCCL.
According to Twitter, some people are without Internet in Bangkok today. Today's Tot internet failure from flooding wouldn't have been if only it were a mesh rather than point to point as @samarajiva has advocated — Don (@smartbrain) January 10, 2017 India is also supposed to have experienced problems with the Tata Indicom Cable connecting Chennai and Singapore. But they had back up options, running traffic through Bangladesh. The report below indicates that this resulted in higher bandwidth use (good) and a discernible degradation of Internet service quality (bad) for Bangladesh users. This is possibly because Bangladesh still primarily depends on SEA-ME-WE 4 to connect to the outside.