August 13, 2013

For the first time India will turn to Bangladesh for meeting its global telecom connectivity requirements. It plans to lease nearly 100 gigabytes (GBs) of international bandwidth from two state-owned suppliers in the neighbouring country to route a chunk of India’s overseas call and data traffic through a new gateway in Agartala, according to an official of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL).

The move is aimed at reducing BSNL’s dependence on Tata Communications Ltd’s Chennai landing station for routing international voice and data traffic emanating from India’s eastern, northeastern and southern states. However, this expenditure of valuable foreign exchange could have been avoided had a planned cable landing station been built on time, say experts.

BSNL has been mandated by the telecom department to ink multi-year international Internet bandwidth leasing pacts with Bangladesh Telecommunications Co Ltd. (BTCL) and Bangladesh Submarine Cable Co Ltd. (BSCCL) to establish optical fibre cable (OFC) connectivity between India and Bangladesh.

Such bilateral OFC links will connect the Agartala international gateway with Dhaka and the Cox’s Bazaar cable landing station in Bangladesh for accessing the global bandwidth. Though commercials are yet to be formalised, BSNL may have to shell out roughly $10 million annually to Bangladesh for leasing international Internet bandwidth over a 10-to-20 year span.

Bangladesh is a co-owner of the South East Asia – Middle East – West Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) submarine cable system that runs from Singapore to France and connects Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, UAE, Tunisia and Algeria. It is the primary Internet backbone between South East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe.