The New Nation - Internet Edition

Mahbubur Rahman Khan

The using of International Gateway (IGW) and Interconnection Exchange (ICX) technology will lead the country a step further to the high of advanced country. It will also influence the socio-economic condition of the country.

Experts said this at the inauguration ceremony of IGW and ICX a few days ago.

Let see how these advanced technology will function and aid to our telecommunication system.

Bangladesh Telegram and Telephone Board (BTTB) has been operating as a medium of connector of both international and national call since after liberation.

As a result, people faced many problems including call jam and network failure. Taking the opportunity of the problems, some greedy businessmen started VoIP business illegally.

Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) directed drive against these illegal business organizations and confiscated huge illegal VoIP equipments and collected millions of taka as fine.

BTRC mainly introduced IGW and ICX act intending to stop the illegal VoIP business. It called bidding and awarded five companies of which Mir Telecom, Novotel and Bangla Trac get license for conducting IGW and M&H Telecom and Getco get license of ICX.

IGW and ICX are mainly work as telecommunication medium. The communication process will be occurred in three steps. That is, an international call will be caught by IGW through submarine cable or VSAT.

The IGW then send the call to the ICX from where the local subscribers get connection. The process goes to vice versa if anyone wish to contact internationally. All local calls including mobile and land phone will be connected through ICX.

The process may seem to anyone lengthy but confusion become clear when we take an account of the technology that the companies are using. Mir Telecom, the IGW service provider, uses Next Generation Networking technology. They have equipment with a rated process capacity of 2 million Busy Hour Call Attempts (BHCA) (expandable to 16 million), with 25,000 trunks (expandable to 360,000 trunks). It has billing capacity of 8 million Call Data Records (CDRs) per day.

They are using incorporating configurable Jitter Buffer, Voice Activity Detector (VAD), Control Noise Generator (CNG), Echo Cancellation (EC) and other quality optimizing capabilities.

It has extensive Points-of-Purpose (POPs) in Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East. It uses both TDM (standard E-1 and STM-1) and IP (FE and GE) interfaces. It has both high speed Sub-sea (SWM-4) and Intelsat Satellite connectivity.

GETCO, the ICX service provider, has equipment with a capacity of 9.2 million BHCA. It is linked with media gateway. It system can support 205,830 concurrent call.

It uses world class billing system on Sun Platform running Oracle Billing and revenue management suite. It has capablility of processing 35 million CDRs per day.

Besides, providing better inter operator and international connectivity ICX technology will aid to monitor call effectively as all the traffic is routed through it.

It will help to reduce stealing or hijacking of mobile. The International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number of mobile will be registered as a result the owner of the mobile can block it at any time.

Internet users will be able to make domestic or a international phone calls from computers at a very low cost.

Mobile users will be the owner of their mobile numbers. If a Grameenphone user want to take a Banglalink connection for better service or rate, he or she can keep his or her 017 number and use the Banglalink connection.

Experts hope the whole scenario of Bangladesh in telecommunication sector will be changed by 2015 if the companies can work properly.