Deal inked for second subsea cable

Bangladesh has signed a contract with a consortium to install a second submarine cable that will increase the country's internet bandwidth by sevenfold.
The SEA-ME-WE-5 cable that will connect 15 leading operators in the Asia-Pacific and Europe is expected to be installed in 22 months.
“Bangladesh will be one of the consortium members as we signed the contract with an objective to get 1,400 gigabits per second of internet bandwidth for the country,” said Monwar Hossain, managing director of Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Ltd.
The contract was signed on Friday in Kuala Lumpur.
The Submarine Cable Company will have to spend around Tk 560 crore to acquire the 1,400 Gbps capacity. The company will get Tk 240 crore in loans from Islamic Development Bank, while the rest will come from the company's own resources, Hossain said.
The cable's landing station will be in Kuakata in the southern district of Patuakhali. France's Alcatel-Lucent and Japanese NEC—both telecom and network equipment makers—will build the cable for the consortium.
The SEA-ME-WE 5 system will deliver a design capacity of 24 terabits per second, according to a statement of NEC.
The system will span 20,000 kilometres connecting Singapore to France via Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Djibouti, Yemen, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Italy. NEC will deploy the segment spanning from Singapore to Sri Lanka, while Alcatel-Lucent will install the Sri Lanka-France segments.
Linette Lee, chairperson of the SEA-ME-WE 5 management committee, said, "As more data, applications and services move to the cloud, we need a more dynamic and agile way to serve end-users.”
“We are confident that Alcatel-Lucent and NEC's 100G undersea technology will provide us with the flexibility to address the increasing requirements for connectivity, as well as address new growth areas such as cloud computing for remote access," she said in a statement.