The government has decided to bring its 18,000 offices at upazila and district levels under a single internet network by June next year, using fibre optic and microwave connectivity of Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL).
Officials said that the decision came at a meeting of the steering committee of Infosarkar project held at the conference room of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Division on February 11 with its secretary N I Khan in the chair.
The connectivity of upazila and district offices will be established with Taka 1333 crore Infosarkar project (phase II) under Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC) of ICT Division, they said.
As per the decision, the 30 offices of each of the 487 upazilas and 55 offices of each of the 64 districts have been selected to provide equipment including video conferencing unit, router to set up for setting up network, they said. The 18,000 offices of upazilas and districts have been selected through a survey conducted by the Infosarkar project of Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC) that revealed 290 upazilas out of 487 having fibre optic and 197 having micro-wave connectivity.
“We have decided to set up connectivity first with those upazila and district offices where fibre optic connectivity is available and then we will go for establishing connectivity in the upazila and district offices which have microwave connectivity,” N I Khan told BSS.
He said the project implementation plan has been designed to bring all the 18,000 offices under a single networking by June 2015.
But, implementation of one of the major components of the project including setting up Disaster Recovery Centre (DRC) may take sometime as Jessore High-Tech Park is not ready for installation of equipment, said N I Khan. The government estimates the cost of the Infosarkar project at Taka 1,333.44 crore with Taka 1,086.75 crore coming from the Chinese government while the remaining amount from the domestic sources.
