The New Nation - Internet Edition

THE government is likely to form a company by June to maintain and operate the submarine cable owned by the Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board. The Ministry of Post and Telecommunications is learnt to have been preparing documents for the said company to increase the use of the undersea cable bandwidth capacity. After completing the process, two documents would be placed before the council of advisers for approval. A draft ordinance on turning the T&T Board into a public limited company with full financial autonomy has already been agreed upon.

Bangladesh has been rather late to be connected with the marine cable and there has been little dynamic move to make it widely connected by expanding network across the country. The country was connected to the international superhighway in May 2006 with an international consortium of 16 telecommunication operators connecting 14 countries of three continents from Singapore to France. The Telephone Board spends around US$1.5 million a year on the maintenance and operation of the cable. But the undersea cable has remained underused because of weak management and marketing. Hardly 14 per cent of the 24-gigabit per second cable is now in use.

Though the BTTB is expected to earn Taka 200 crore from the marine cable in the current fiscal year, the amount is too meagre compared to the investment that has so far been made. The cable can generate a huge amount of revenue provided it is properly managed and run. The board, earlier, projected that the demand for telecom and internet services would shoot up rapidly in three years. It was also suggested that the government should install a second submarine cable as a backup of the existing submarine cable and to meet the growing demand for internet and overseas network services.