Consortium to invest $110m for first pvt submarine cable

A consortium of three private submarine cable companies is set to invest $110 million to set up a separate submarine cable network in a boost to the country's internet connectivity.
The consortium comprising Summit Communications, CdNet Communications and Metacore Subcom Ltd. had intended to invest more but the recent foreign exchange crisis forced them to scale down the investment size.
The investors said the first ever private submarine cable would connect Bangladesh with the outside world in around March next year for data transmission.
The consortium is expected to add around 50,000 Gbps of bandwidth to the national internet highway, which might reduce the cost of internet significantly, said one of the top officials of the consortium.
When the dollar crisis will ease in future, the consortium may cease to exist and each company will invest separately, according to the consortium officials.
"We invested together because of scarcity of foreign currency; this crisis may go on for three to four years, then we may disintegrate," Arif Al Islam, managing director and chief executive officer of Summit Communications Limited, told The Financial Express.
He said they had to go through a very difficult phase to get permission for investing USD$110 million amid a foreign exchange crunch.
Arif Al Islam said they could have set up separate cables, instead of the proposed single cable, if the initially-targeted investment was possible in the local currency.
"USD crisis is the only reason we have made the consortium," he said.
The consortium was formed with the three private licensees of submarine cable to install the cable to Singapore.
The 3,000-kilometer undersea cable running from Singapore will be installed in two phases to connect Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar to the Sigmar cable, a 1,900-kilometre long cable system connecting Singapore and Myanmar.
The three companies involved in the project will pay around $35 million each for the first phase and will have the exclusive rights to use the cable for 25 years.
For the second phase, the companies will finalise a deal with the submarine cable provider HMN to lay fibre from Cox's Bazar to Myanmar, costing an additional $45 million.
Arif Al Islam said though they were setting up a single cable, the companies could sell bandwidth separately to ISPs, IIG and other clients.
The undersea cable will have three pairs of fibre optic cables and will be able to transmit data at a rate of about 15,000 gigabits per second (Gbps) per pair.
The cable will connect Bangladesh to Telin-3, a data centre located in Tanjong Kling, Singapore.
Currently, Bangladesh's total bandwidth use is about 5,000 Gbps. More than half of this, or about 2,700 Gbps, comes under international terrestrial cable (ITC) licences, which are used to import bandwidth from India over land.
The rest, about 2,300 Gbps, is provided by the Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Limited (BSCPLC), which connects the country to two submarine cables.
Bangladesh is a member of the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) consortium, operating the first undersea cable that Bangladesh was connected to in 2006. It provides about 800 Gbps of bandwidth.
The BSCPLC provides 1,500 Gbps of bandwidth through the SEA-ME-WE 5, which was connected in 2017.
The company is expected to receive 13,200 Gbps of bandwidth from a third undersea cable, SEA-ME-WE 6, by 2025.
The project cost for SEA-ME-WE 6, the BSCPLC's third cable, was set at Tk 10.55 million.
The BSCPLC is also spending $3.2 million to increase the capacity of its first undersea cable nearly six times to 4,600 Gbps.

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