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. 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 Division on February 11 with its secretary NI Khan in the chair.
The connectivity of upazila and district offices will be established with Tk 1,333 crore Infosarkar project (phase II) under Bangladesh Computer Council 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 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 upzila and district offices which have microwave connectivity,’ NI Khan told the news agency.
He said the project implementation plan had 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 may take some time as Jessore High-Tech Park is not ready for installation of equipment, said NI Khan.
The government estimates the cost of the Infosarkar project at Tk 1,333.44 crore with Tk 1,086.75 crore coming from the Chinese government while the remaining amount from the domestic sources.
Project director Md Saiful Islam said under the project the existing Datacentre of BCC would be enriched, 25,000 tablet PCs would be provided to government employees and computer lab would be established in 12 public universities, BCC and BTCL.
-With New Age input