Bandwidth consumption in Bangladesh soared 94 percent year-on-year to 970 gigabits per second (Gbps) in 2018 thanks to the expansion of fixed broadband and rollout of 4G telecom services.
The figure stood at only 300 Gbps at the end of 2016.
Bandwidth is a measure of how much data a network can transfer. Internet providers denote bandwidth speeds in millions of bits per second, or megabits (Mbps), and billions of bits per second, or gigabits (Gbps). The higher the bandwidth, the faster the speed.
“This is big news that Bangladesh's total bandwidth use is close to one terabyte,” said Sumon Ahmed Sabir, chief technology officer of Fiber@Home Global, one of the leading wholesale bandwidth suppliers of the country.
But about 75 percent of the bandwidth is used for browsing Facebook and YouTube -- in most cases for unproductive activities, he said.
“Rising bandwidth consumption indicates digital development. But the policymakers should concentrate more on how digitisation can be used effectively to develop and make life easier for the citizens.”
The increasing internet use has helped bandwidth consumption to double every year and pushed the annual internet economy to reach Tk 5,000 crore, industry insiders said. That a major portion of a country's bandwidth is consumed for browsing Facebook and YouTube is a global trend, they said.
An increasing number of government services are being made available online, which has also increased the bandwidth consumption, they opined.
The number of active internet connections was 8.05 crore at the end of 2017, which rose to 9.18 crore in November 2018, according to data from Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC).
The country now has 57.35 lakh active broadband connections and they are the major consumers of data.
Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Ltd (BSCCL), a state-run venture that owns two submarine cable connections, supplies around 62 percent or 605 Gbps of the country's total bandwidth consumption.
The rest of the bandwidth comes from India through six international terrestrial cable service providers based in Bangladesh.
The BSCCL is supplying 285 Gbps from its first cable in Cox's Bazar and 320 Gbps from the second one in Kuakata that started operations in 2017, said Mashiur Rahman, managing director of the BSCCL.
“Before the launch of the second cable, we used to own half of the market share. It started rising gradually as we have reduced the data prices drastically.”
He said they are experiencing a fabulous growth in the industry.
The BSCCL's subscribers used 272 Gbps in September 2017, which went on to cross 600 Gbps in a year, he said.
The volume of data use has been accelerating in the last five to six months and the state-run entity's income has been swelling keeping pace with the growth, he said.
In the July-September period of 2017, the company's earnings per share was only Tk 0.03. It hit Tk 0.04 in the next period, Tk 0.47 in the three months to September in 2018 and Tk 0.50 in the next three-month quarter.
To meet the growing demand, the BSCCL will add another 20 Gbps to the supply channel by next week, said Rahman.
Source: https://www.thedailystar.net/business/news/bandwidth-usage-goes-94pc-1687738