The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has initiated a move to convince tech giants to establish a data centre in Bangladesh.
It has already requested TikTok to come up with investment in this regard and planned to hold similar discussions with Google and Facebook, sources at the BTRC said.
They said BTRC Chairman Emdad ul Bari spoke about the initiative at a meeting on Tuesday last.
The upcoming meetings with Facebook and Google would also focus on the same, they added.
Currently, more than 50 million people in Bangladesh use TikTok and about 65 million people use Facebook, according to mobile phone operators.
Google remains a key platform widely used for both entertainment and information searches.
Despite their large user bases in the country, none of these platforms are yet to set up local data centres, a longstanding request from the government of Bangladesh.
Facebook and Google have established data centres in Kolkata, benefiting the entire South Asian region.
Bangladesh, for instance, imports bandwidth from India through the International Terrestrial Cable (ITC), which is cheaper than the bandwidth from the submarine cables within the country.
Experts believe this price difference is contributing to a decline in submarine cable usage in Bangladesh.
Currently, the country uses about 5,000 Gbps of bandwidth, with half sourced from submarine cables and the other half from the ITC.
Just a year ago, submarine cables provided 60 per cent of the total bandwidth.
A BTRC official told the FE that they have taken it seriously and would push this issue persistently to set up offices and data centres in the country.
Since Google, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok have not opened offices in this country, the BTRC cannot force them to set up the data centres.
"We can only request them to build a data centre in our country," said the BTRC official.
He said that the tech giants like Facebook and Google look at their business case in a country before setting up a data centre. "We have to keep pushing for it," he added.
© 2024 - All Rights with The Financial Express
