Bandwidth export deal with India this month

Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company plans to sign a deal with an Indian firm this month to export 10 gigabits per second bandwidth to Tripura, a northeastern state in India.

A team will go to India to sign the deal tentatively on January 27 with state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd or BSNL.

BSNL will purchase 10 Gbps initially and will increase the amount gradually, said Monwar Hossain, managing director of Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company, a state-owned entity.

A 22-kilometre optical fibre cable link from Brahmanbaria to Akhaura boarder will be developed in four months to transport the bandwidth.

“We will rent the link to be developed by a firm suggested by Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission,” Hossain said.

Meghalaya and Assam also expressed their interest to have such facility from Bangladesh, he said. “We hope to export at least 100 GB bandwidth to the northeastern states of India in future,” he said.

The deal was supposed to be signed in the middle of last year, he said. “But it was postponed then as BSNL wanted tele-transit through Bangladesh instead of purchasing bandwidth.”

The Indian company later agreed to sign the purchase deal, as Bangladesh turned down the transit proposal.

Bangladesh is the best option for the north-eastern states of India to purchase bandwidth from -- at a cheap rate compared with other parts of India due to distance.

India also exports bandwidth through terrestrial cables to Bangladesh.

Currently, six local terrestrial cables connected with Indian cables provide bandwidth to different service providers of Bangladesh.

These cables also work as a backup for the lone submarine cable of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh's submarine cable, whose lifetime will end in the next 12 years, has a bandwidth capacity of 200 Gbps, while it sells only 32 Gbps.

Bangladesh will get another undersea cable of around 1,400 Gbps in 2016, while industry insiders say the country's demand for bandwidth may reach 210 Gbps by 2021.