Glitch in submarine cable slows Bangladesh internet speed

Web pages loading slowly? A submarine fibre-optic cable fault could be why.

Internet users in Bangladesh are experiencing slow speed following a technical glitch in the cable.

Internet service providers say it will take about a week to fix the problem.

Monwar Hossain, Managing Director of Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company, said the problem occurred somewhere between India's Mumbai and Chennai of the SEA-ME-WE-4 cable which has a maximum capacity of 480 gigabits per second.

Internet users have been complaining of slower than expected upload and download speeds and latency since Saturday.

Hossain said they were using the 'east segment' as a backup since the 'west segment' of the 39,000-kilometre cable was having trouble.

Apart from this, there are six International Terrestrial Cable (ITC) connections keeping Bangladesh connected to the internet.

ITC company Fibre At Home Limited's spokesperson Abbas Faruk said ITCs were connected with more than one submarine cable.

Subscribers using ITC bandwidth were also having slow connectivity, he said.

Hossain said the problem would be solved ‘soon’ without giving a timeframe.

"It'll take a few days to restore internet connections at normal speed," he added.