A heavy silence descends over a home when a mother in a Sunamganj haorarea waits for her daughter’s call from Dhaka, and the signal fails. Her phone shows three bars, then one, then none. She steps onto a stool by the tin window, searching for the sweet spot where the signal usually comes through.
To a network engineer, that dropped call is merely a part of coverage statistics; to her, it is the difference between peace of mind and being left waiting for enough signal bars.
We have spent two decades planting towers across Bangladesh, yet we rarely ask why, even beneath their shadows, so many remain digitally stranded.
This is the quiet divide. The national conversation about telecom is loud with the language of spectrum, mergers, and balance sheets, and louder still since VEON, through its subsidiary Banglalink, formally proposed a strategic combination with state-owned Teletalk alongside a separate bid to acquire the mobile financial service Nagad.
It is a serious proposal from a credible investor that has injected more than $2.5 billion into the country over 21 years. Yet, beneath the headlines lies a truth no transaction can resolve: We have made access universal, but not universally meaningful.
Universal signals, exclusive realities
Consider a fact that should trouble anyone who believes our digital mission is nearly finished.
While 4G networks now reach virtually the whole population, less than 54% of people in Bangladesh use the internet, trailing our South Asian peers despite near-universal phone ownership. The digital pipe is filled with data, yet many screens remain dark. This usage gap now overshadows the old coverage gap that dominated policy for twenty years: we paved the road but did not ensure everyone could walk it.
That gap is not random; it falls along our existing fault lines of inequality.
Across low- and middle-income countries, women are still 12% less likely than men to use mobile internet. Of the 810 million women worldwide who remain offline, more than two-thirds live in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The barriers are human, not technical.
An entry-level smartphone can cost close to a quarter of a woman’s monthly income; where money is scarce, a household buys a single phone, and it usually belongs to the man.
Add limited literacy, low digital skills, and justified concerns about online safety, and it becomes clear why a tower’s reach and a person’s reach are not the same thing.
When the unconnected are counted only as future customers, the market's answer is always the same: Build more, sell more, wait for demand.
But the market has already shown us where it stops. It stops at the woman who cannot afford a handset, the farmer whose village is profitable to cover but unprofitable to upgrade, leaving the elderly widow with a screen she was never taught to navigate.
These are no simple anomalies. They are millions of citizens who might have come across the digital age in name only, while the foundation of universal connectivity remains a distant reality.
Beyond commodities: Connectivity as a capability
To truly understand the cost of this digital divide, we must examine what is lost on the wrong side of the line.
Bangladesh’s mobile financial services (MFS) is a global marvel, with bKash alone serving over 83 million customers and the wider system facilitating tens of millions of daily transactions.
For a garment worker, receiving wages directly on her phone rather than via a middleman is far more than a convenience, it is an unprecedented baseline of personal autonomy. For a day labourer remitting his earnings the exact evening they are made, the network serves as a vital anchor holding a fragmented family together across the expanse between city and village.
This human dimension cannot be captured in a typical corporate business case. A mobile connection is not merely a commodity for users; it’s a capability granted to people, unlocking a dignity no ledger can quantify.
Consider a student in Kurigram sitting for an online admission test she could never afford to travel for, a midwife reaching a doctor before a rural delivery turns dangerous, or a marginal farmer checking the day’s market price before a middleman can deceive him.
Each is an act of equality, made possible by a signal that holds.
To bridge this gap, Bangladesh constructed a parallel human infrastructure that deserves far more recognition: A network of around 9,500 digital centres serving six to seven million rural citizens every month.
By providing assisted access, these hubs allow those lacking technical literacy to reap the rewards of the digital shift. They stand as a pragmatic admission that network coverage alone was never a complete story. Ultimately, a signal no one can navigate is nothing more than a streetlight over an empty road.
Cautionary lessons from other nations
Bangladesh is not the first nation to discover that connecting a population and serving it are fundamentally different undertakings. The precedents most relevant to us are the cautionary ones.
Across parts of Latin America and Eastern Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s, governments under fiscal strain rushed to sell off state telecomoperators. Where those sales lacked rigorous competition safeguards, public monopolies simply mutated into private ones. Prices climbed, rural investment evaporated, and the citizens promised liberation found a new landlord, not an equitable market.
The opposite error proved just as costly. Where states clung to neglected national operators and starved them of investment, those entities decayed into expensive monuments, draining the treasury while offering the public no credible alternative to market exploitation.
The pattern across both failures is a warning: Doing nothing invites slow decay, while acting without a citizen-centred plan invites structural exploitation.
The architecture of any deal matters, but its real test remains human: Does the ordinary subscriber emerge with more power, more choice, and more dignity, or less?
It is through this human lens, rather than the cash register, that proposals like VEON’s must be evaluated. The instinct to welcome credible capital is sound; a state operator holding under 4% of the market while sitting on valuable, underutilized spectrum cannot be left to languish indefinitely.
Similarly, the recent agreement to bring Starlink’s direct-to-cell satellite service to Bangladesh hints at a transformative possibility where the remotest char and disaster-prone coast might finally be reached.
Yet, hope is not a policy. Whether these investments close our human divide or simply optimize a profitable one depends on the regulatory conditions we mandate.
A mission for true inclusion
What, then, should we demand? Not more grand declarations of a “Smart Bangladesh,” but a fundamental reframing of what success means.
For two decades, we measured progress in towers built, subscribers added, and gigabytes sold. The next chapter must be measured in people meaningfully included, especially those the market reaches last: Women, the rural poor, the elderly, the disabled.
That reframing has practical edges. It means treating the affordable smartphone as a critical bottleneck, using micro-financing, refurbished-device programs, and targeted subsidies to put handsets into the hands of those priced out of the market, a barrier the GSMA identifies as one of the top obstacles women face, with an entry-level handset costing nearly a quarter of a woman's monthly income.
It means funding digital literacy with the same urgency we bring to spectrum auctions; after all, an unusable device is no gift at all. And it means any partnership involving a public asset like Teletalk should carry binding, measurable obligations to serve the unserved, not vague promises to be settled later by the same commercial logic that left them excluded in the first place.
The mother in Sunamganj stepping onto a stool for a signal is not demanding 5G, artificial intelligence, or satellite constellations, though she may one day benefit from them.
She is asking for something primal and simpler: To reach out and be reached. Bangladesh has proven it can build the road. The unfinished work, and the ultimate test of our digital progress, is ensuring no one is left standing silently on the shoulder. The towers were the easy part; true inclusion is the actual destination.
Dr Sabbir Ahmad is a tech executive with global experience in digital connectivity and energy, now shaping Bangladesh's semiconductor landscape as the CEO of Silicon Array Ltd. Email: sabbir@ieee.org.