The South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 5 submarine cable broke down in Singapore Friday night, affecting internet services in Bangladesh.
The SEA-ME-WE 5 submarine cable is Bangladesh鈥檚 second submarine cable installed in Kuakata, and one of the largest suppliers of international bandwidth in the country.
Mirza Kamal Ahmed, managing director of the Bangladesh Submarine Cables PLC (BSCPLC), said that the Bangladesh authorities were not aware as to when the problem could be fixed.
鈥楾he SEA-ME-WE 5 consortium is yet to identify the cause of the problem. Possibly, we think, any ship鈥檚 anchor may have hit the cable,鈥� he added.
Multiple broadband internet users in Bangladesh said that they faced disturbance while browsing the internet as loading websites was taking too much time, and operating internet-based works was becoming impossible since midnight past Friday.
International bandwidth usage in Bangladesh is around 5,200 Gbps and about 1,700 Gbps of that bandwidth is supplied by the SEA-ME-WE 5 submarine cable.
The SEA-ME-WE 5 is a 20,000km submarine cable system connecting 17 countries through Points-of-Presence from Singapore to the Middle East to France and Italy in Western Europe.
The cable of SEA-ME-WE 5 in the western side that connected Singapore got broken on Friday at 12:00am and all traffic between Kuakata-Singapore through the submarine cable is now shut down, according to BSCPLC鈥檚 press release issued on Saturday.
The BSCPLC is shifting a substantial amount of the intercepted bandwidth to SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable, the press release said.
