The New Nation - Internet Edition

Staff Reporter

The government plans to provide free Internet access to the people of all spheres of life, special assistant to the Chief Adviser Brig General MA Malek yesterday said while inaugurating first ever private-owned International Gateway (IGW).

He said the government was keen to spread internet service to the urban as well as rural areas. "To make this attempt successful the government will give subsidy to the internet users. 100 per cent subsidy will be given to the primary school students, 75 per cent to high school students and 50 per cent to the college students", he added.

Appreciating the private-owned IGW service Malek said, "We want to develop private culture in the country as history refers to the failure of government owned organisations."

He pointed out that the BTTB would not face any problem in competing with the private sector as it already has some advantages including infrastructure and human resources.

Monjurul Alam, Chairman of BTRC, said government would be able to earn Tk 1500 annually by awarding licence to three telecom organisations- Mir Telecom, Novotel and Banglatrac communications Ltd.

To provide Bangladeshi people more swift and easy international call Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) awarded IGW license to Mir Telecom on February 19 to transit international voice calls to and from Bangladesh.

In an attempt to accomplish all the tasks within six-month time frame, Mir Telecom has been able to kick off its task three days ahead of deadline.

Mir Telecom employed cutting-edge technology, which supports Next Generation Networking capabilities. It uses Huawei's SoftX3000, UMG8900 and CBOSS's internconnect Billing solution.

It also uses equipment with a rated process capacity of two million Busy Hour Call Attempt (BHCA), which can be expanded to 16 million, with 25,000 trunks that can be expanded to 360,000 trunks. It has billing capacity of eight million Call Data Record (CDR).

Mir uses incorporating Configurable Jitter Buffer, Voice Activity Detector (VAD), Comfort Noise Generator (CNG), Echo Cancellation (EC) and other quality optimising capabilities.

Mir telecom has extensive Points-of-Presence (POPs) in Europe and Asia Pacific reaching all major carriers and all corners of the world.