Submarine cable installation halted by high tide

High tide in the Bay of Bengal has halted the installation works of the second submarine cable for a few months now -- a development that will delay the country's connection to the undersea information super highway by a year.

The installation works, which were fully suspended in May, will not resume before November, when the strength of the tide is expected to subside, said a senior official of state-owned Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Ltd (BSCCL).

The initial plan was to connect with the cable in the first half of 2016, but now it will happen in the first half of next year, said Monwar Hossain, managing director of BSCCL, the country's lone submarine cable company.

“This year, the sea was rougher than in the last few years. That's why we can't work according to our plan,” he said, adding that the other works are going on as per schedule.

At present, the cable is nine kilometres away from the seashore at Kuakata of Patuakhali district -- its landing point.

Called the South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 5 (SEA-ME-WE 5), it is an optical fibre submarine communications cable system that will provide telecom services between Southeast Asia and Western Europe.

BSCCL officially joined the consortium of 18 companies from 14 countries after signing a deal in March 2014 to get connected with the 20,000km cable line from Singapore to France.

The project will cost Tk 660.64 crore, and the Islamic Development Bank will provide Tk 352 crore as loan. Of the remaining amount, the government will provide Tk 166 crore and BSCCL Tk 142.64 crore, according to the project document.

Some members of the consortium have already been connected with the information super highway and are now enjoying high-speed connectivity, according to the official website of SEA-ME-WE 5.

Once the country is connected to the cable, its bandwidth capacity will shoot to 1,300 gigabits per second (Gbps), Hossain said, adding that BSCCL will also be able to slash the bandwidth price.

The country got its first submarine cable connection, SEA-ME-WE 4, in 2006. The cable's capacity is 200 Gbps and more than 130 Gbps of it is currently in use. Initially, the lifespan of the cable was set at 20 years, but it could now be extended by five years.

Bangladesh's total data consumption has crossed the 300-Gbps mark; around 200 Gbps comes from India by way of terrestrial cable connectivity.

Hossain said the country will also be able to export the surplus bandwidth from the SEA-ME-WE 5 cable.

“There is a scarcity of resources in landlocked countries like Nepal and Bhutan and they have already showed interest in importing bandwidth from us,” Hossain added.

Apart from the BSCCL, the other companies that joined the consortium include Singapore Telecommunications, China Mobile, China Telecommunications, China Unicom, Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company, Orange, PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia, Saudi Telecom Company, Telekom Malaysia and several companies from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Thailand and India.