Satellite services from June 2018: Tarana
The Bangabandhu-1 satellite will be ready to provide commercial service from the middle of next year, said Tarana Halim, state minister for telecom, yesterday.
“We hope to launch the Bangabandhu-1 Satellite commercially by June next year,” she told reporters at her office.
The state minister recently visited Thales Alenia Space, the French aerospace firm which is manufacturing Bangladesh's first communications satellite.
Before starting to provide the commercial services, the satellite will be sent into orbit in December or January, if weather permits, she added. “We can fix the launch date by July.”
The authorities will have to complete some procedures before the commercial launch, Tarana added.
Earlier, the government had targeted December 16 this year as the launch date, to coincide the occasion with the celebration of the Victory Day.
However, after a meeting with Prime Minister's ICT Affairs Adviser Sajeeb Wazed Joy, the division changed the date as the government wants to celebrate the milestone through a countrywide weeklong programme. The satellite will be launched from Florida, US but Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will be in Dhaka at that time to attend the celebration, said Tarana.
The state minister said more than 85 percent of the work on the satellite has been completed; the manufacturer is now only fine-tuning it.
In November 2015, Bangladesh Tele-communication Regulatory Commission signed a deal with Thales Alenia Space for designing and manufacturing the satellite at $248 million (Tk 1,959 crore).
The total cost of the project is about Tk 2,967.95 crore. It, however, might come down by a few hundred crores taka, said officials related to the project.
The government is now in the process of forming a separate public limited company to look after all the issues of the broadcast satellite as the local partner of Thales Alenia Space. The satellite is so far the most sophisticated technological project Bangladesh has ever undertaken.
Once launched, its services will narrow the digital divide by taking broadcasting and telecom services to rural areas and introducing profitable services, including direct-to-home services. Bangladesh bought the orbital slot from Intersputnik, a Russian satellite company, for $28 million.
Spectra Engineers Ltd, Thales' partner in Bangladesh, is completing two ground handling stations in Gazipur and Rangamati each, a project official said.