Internet, telecoms in chaos

Internet and international telecom services were disrupted, for the second time within a week, from yesterday noon as miscreants in Chakoria, 121km off Chittagong, snapped the optical fibre line that connects the nation to the submarine cable.
On August 22, miscreants cut the optical fibre line at two points--about 60 metres of it in Lohagara, 76km off Chittagong. That line was restored before evening the next day.
This time, criminals at Chakoria snapped the cable around 2:30pm yesterday. A press release from Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) says that its technical team is trying to repair the line.
This disruption deprives the BTTB of a revenue of $70,000 per hour.
The submarine cable is Bangladesh's gateway to the international information superhighway. Different Internet service providers (ISPs) use around 577 megabyte per second (MBps) bandwidth of this cable while the BTTB uses it for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) based international calls. When this service is disrupted, the ISPs are forced to use very small aperture terminals (VSAT)-based backup systems, which provides inadequate Internet bandwidth, while the BTTB's VoIP based international calls remain suspended.