State minister for posts, telecommunications and information technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak said on Saturday that a meeting on the restoration of mobile internet 4G services would be held with mobile operators on Sunday.
He said this while addressing an event held at Agargaon in the capital marking Sajeeb Wazed Joy鈥檚 54th birthday.
鈥楢 meeting with the Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh will be held at 9:00am on Sunday, and if the meeting is satisfactory, the 4G network will be restored by Sunday or Monday,鈥� said Palak.
He claimed the internet was not intentionally shut down in the country but was disrupted as three data centres and hundreds of kilometres of cables were burnt during the recent unrest centring around the quota reform movement.
These incidents caused a loss of Tk500 crore to the telecom sector alone, he added.
He also said that 17 locations in the Dhaka division came under attack.
鈥業n Mohakhali, three data centres housed 18 IIG systems, which hosted 70 per cent of the ISP servers, causing the internet disruption. We did not intentionally shut down the internet,鈥� said Palak, who claimed that the disruption was the result of a planned act of sabotage.
鈥楢nalysis of mobile operator data from July 18 showed that between 50,000 to 100,000 new SIM cards were used in areas, including Uttara, Rampura, Mohammadpur, Jatrabari and Gazipur,鈥� he said.