The government recently cracked down on pornography sites with orders to block access to thousands of sites. Although the effort has lowered the bandwidth used to watch porn (40 percent before) a total of 21 percent of the bandwidth is still in use for it, says Internet Service Providers Association Bangladesh (ISPAB).

According to ISPAB, a total of 1150 gigabits/second (gbps) of bandwidth are currently in use the currently. Amongst it, 241.5 gbps are used to access porn sites.

Authorities are turning a blind eye to the fact that despite porn browsing going down at the government’s initiatives, quite a people are turning to alternate ways to do so.

An ISPBA data shows that 24 percent of the total bandwidth is spent behind Facebook, Youtube and Google.

Around 40 percent for software development, internet browsing and e-mails.

Video calling services and gaming apps use to 10 percent, miscellaneous sources use 5 percent and porn sites uses up 21 percent.

Before the government’s countrywide crackdown on porn, a whopping 70 percent (of the 40 percent) bandwidth was used at night and five percent was used during the day.

Meanwhile, video-sharing site, ‘Tik Tok’ has taken down around 200,000 posts as the government deemed them ‘inappropriate.’

Telecoms and IT Mustafa Jabbar said that access to around 20,000 porn sites has been blocked.

“Around 45 percent of the bandwidth is used productively and the rest of the 55 percent used non-productively,” said ISPAB General Secretary Imdadul Hoque.

“Viewing porn has gone down at the government’s initiative. We see it as a primary success,” he added.

He said that things would go back to the way they were if the strict measures do not continue to be in place.

Hoque said that since access has been blocked to most of the popular sites, people are having to browse harder to find accessible sites.

People familiar with the matter say that there are over 20 million porn websites all over the world, not all of which are accessible from Bangladesh.