Update, October 2026 — The cable signed for in this 2021 report is SEA-ME-WE 6. It has since been laid, Bangladesh’s branch lands at Cox’s Bazar, and service was expected to begin in the first quarter of 2026. Where the project got to is set out below the original article.
Md Afzal Hossain, secretary of the Posts and Telecommunications Division and chairman of the Board of Directors of Bangladesh Submarine Company Limited (BSCCL), signed the agreement at InterContinental Dhaka on Thursday.
The member organisations of the consortium will sign a similar agreement on behalf of their countries and send it to the temporary headquarters of the consortium in Singapore by 30 September this year.
The 15 companies participating in the SEA-ME-WE 6 consortium include Singtel (Singapore), BSCCL (Bangladesh), Telekom (Malaysia), SLT (Sri Lanka), Dhiraagu (the Maldives), Ni2i (India), TWA (Pakistan), Djibouti Telecom (Djibouti), Mobilink (Saudi Arabia), China Mobile International, China Telecom Global Limited China, China Unicom, Microsoft (United States), Telecom Egypt, and Orange (France).
Posts and Telecommunications Minister Mustafa Jabbar, the chief guest at the programme, said the third submarine cable will be launched by 2024.
"SEA-ME-WE 6 will make an unimaginable contribution to establishing uninterrupted connectivity with the digital world by meeting the growing demand for digital connectivity in the coming days," said the minister.
Referring to the submarine cable as one of the most essential telecommunications infrastructure in the country, Mustafa Jabbar said, "The then government refused the proposal of setting up the submarine cable connection to Bangladesh for free in 1992, leaving Bangladesh behind in the world of information technology for 14 years."
He said only 8 Gbps Internet was used in the country in 2008 and there were only seven lakh users. But currently 11 crore people in the country are using the Internet and 2,700 Gbps bandwidth is being used. The third submarine cable connection for Bangladesh is another historic achievement for the country.
Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission Chairman Shyam Sunder Sikder and SEA-ME-WE 6 Project Director Kamal Ahmed spoke at the programme presided over by BSCCL Managing Director Mashiur Rahman.
BSCCL Managing Director Mashiur Rahman said, "Today, more than 2,700 Gbps international bandwidth is being used in the country, of which the BSCCL alone is providing about 1,650 Gbps bandwidth."
By 2024, the country will need more than 6,000 Gbps of international bandwidth, he said.
Work on the implementation of the third submarine cable started in 2019. Three proposals for laying submarine cables were initially shortlisted and approved at the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council's meeting in December 2020.
But due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the selection of suppliers by the consortium was delayed. As a result, the consortium's proposed activities, scheduled to be launched by December 2020, were also postponed.
Bangladesh's first submarine cable was launched in 2006 and the second in the first quarter of 2017.
Besides supplying bandwidth to the country, the BSCCL is also exporting bandwidth to neighbouring countries. The BSCCL has signed a new agreement with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, a state-owned company in India, to export 10 Gbps bandwidth.
Where the project got to
The system signed for here is SEA-ME-WE 6, running from Singapore to France across the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, with core landing stations in Singapore, India, Djibouti, Egypt and France. Bangladesh's branch reaches a landing station at Cox's Bazar, making it the country's third landing point after the SEA-ME-WE 4 connection and the SEA-ME-WE 5 station at Kuakata.
The cable was installed at landing points in France, Egypt, the Maldives, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, with service expected to begin in the first quarter of 2026. Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company's stake grew as the project progressed — its investment rose to around US$100 million, for an expected 13,200 Gbps of capacity.
Why a third cable mattered more than the capacity figure
The headline number is the least interesting part. What a third cable buys is route diversity.
A submarine cable is a physical object on a seabed, and the things that break it are mundane: ship anchors, fishing gear, undersea landslides. Repairs require a cable ship to reach the fault, lift the cable and splice it, which takes weeks rather than hours. A country with one cable loses its international connectivity when that happens; a country with two loses redundancy the moment either is cut, and must buy expensive terrestrial transit through a neighbour to cover the gap.
Three cables landing at three separate points on the coast means a single anchor strike, or a single landing-station failure, no longer determines whether the country is online. That is the actual product.
The structural question it leaves
Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company remains the only operator permitted to build and own international submarine cables serving the country. Concentrating all three systems in one state-linked company is a deliberate policy choice with a real trade-off: it makes national capacity planning straightforward and keeps a strategic asset in public hands, and it means every internet service provider in the country buys international bandwidth from a single domestic supplier.
Whether that produces competitive wholesale pricing is a separate question from whether the cables get built, and the two are often discussed as though they were the same.
