As an immigrant, there is nothing I enjoy more than a chat with family back in the old country. I never think twice about not being able to get relatives on the phone, but that is because Granny and Granddad don’t live in Bangladesh. Apparently it used to be fairly easy to get through to Bangladesh, but it has suddenly become next to impossible.
The reason is not some sort of calamity – war, cyclone, etc. – but the government’s insistence on cracking down on “corruption.” Corruption (bribes, shady deals, etc) is usually always a bad thing, but the Bangladeshi government's definition of “corruption” includes shutting down entrepreneurs offering cheap phone service. The Bangladeshi state-owned phone monopoly is antiquated and unreliable, but it does provide the government with considerable revenues. As a result of phone monopoly’s high costs and often non-existent service, entrepreneurial young Bangladeshis have been offering cheap phone calls in and out of Bangladesh using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). While their ne’er-do-well Western counterparts are busy trying to grow certain plants in their basements, naughty young Bangladeshis have used them to stash whole networks of computers, servers, and modems.
The result was a thriving (and incredibly cheap) shadow telephone service that was literally “underground.” The government apparently underestimated the size of the country’s illicit telephone network and was quite surprised to discover that it carried 80 percent of all inbound telephone traffic from abroad. “The crackdown on corruption” is now hamstringing business and, sadly, keeping homesick Bangladeshis out of touch with their relatives. As is the case throughout much of the developing world, when the invisible hand and the entrepreneur giveth, the dead hand of government taketh away.
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