Starting in the early 1990s, Bangladesh had dialup access to e-mail using the Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) of a few local providers, but the number of users did not total more than 500.
Users were charged by the kilobyte and email was transferred from the BBS service providers to the rest of the world by international dialup using UUCP.
In June 1996 the first VSAT base data circuit in the country was commissioned and the Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) granted licenses to two Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
In subsequent years more liberal government policies led to a rapid expansion of the industry, resulting in over 180 registered ISP's by 2005.
[2] In May 2006 Bangladesh inaugurated new submarine cable optic fiber connectivity as part of the 16 country consortium SEA-ME-WE 4 project.
[4] However, only 0.4% of the population used the Internet in 2009 giving Bangladesh one of the lowest usage percentages in the world, ahead of only North Korea, Myanmar, and Sierra Leone.
[8] "This increased Internet penetration will result in a 2.6 per cent contribution to the country’s GDP by 2020, while creating 129 thousand more jobs by the same year" the research added.
[34] Though broadband Internet access is available, the charges for high speed connections are higher than in other south Asian countries, though this is changing.
The three firms purchased the licenses at auction for 2.15 billion BDT (US$31 million) from the BTRC under an agreement that pays 27.50% of revenue to the government.
[39][40] Expensive and slow connections available from individual homes has created a demand for cyber cafés with higher than average bandwidth.
[45] The Bangla blogging platform Sachalayatan was reported to be inaccessible on 15 July 2008, and was forced to migrate to a new IP address.
The disputed video covered a partial audio recording of a meeting between the prime minister and military officials, who were angry at the government's handling of a mutiny by border guards in Dhaka that left more than seventy people dead.
[46] Facebook was blocked by the BTRC for 7 days starting on 29 May 2010 because of "obnoxious images", including depictions of Mohammed and several of the country's political officials as well as links to pornographic sites.
[48] During the same period a 30-year-old man was arrested in the Bangladeshi capital on charges of uploading satiric images of some political leaders on Facebook.
[49] The BTRC again blocked YouTube access in September 2012 after Google, Inc. ignored requests to remove the controversial film, Innocence of Muslims, from the site.
[50][51] On 16 May 2013 BTRC asked the international internet gateway operators to reduce the upload bandwidth of ISPs by 75% in an effort to prevent illegal VoIP.
[52] There is speculation that the bandwidth reduction is actually an effort to make it difficult for people to upload ‘problematic’ videos, images, TV talk show clips, etc.
[55] The communications blockade continued into 2020,[56] despite objections from the Rohingya community and its global diaspora,[55][57] and from human rights and aid organizations,[56][58] and the United Nations,[56][59] who have complained that the blackout—by limiting essential and urgent communications—increases the refugees' vulnerability to crime,[55] and to the COVID-19 pandemic.