Use of Advanced Optical Transmission Technologies for Redundancy in the Submarine Cable Systems of Bangladesh

Md. Monwar Hossain                                                                       Parvez M. Ashraf  

Introduction

Broadband internet has become a bare necessity for people of all walks and global

communication has become highly incorporated into our daily life, professional, social or

personal. High rates of bandwidth growth have been forecasted throughout the world as

people today are using numerous features of the web such as browsing, emailing, blogging,

twitting, social networking (such as, facebooking), online gaming, audio/video conferencing,

audio/video streaming, listening to internet radio, watching internet TV, VPN, etc. Meeting

the rapidly increasing demand for capacity in the global and national information

superhighways is a great challenge as ever. Moreover, with the advent of 3G Mobile services

and LTE, people are and will be using their cell phones and mobile devices to get all kinds of

internet  facilities whenever and wherever they want. Thus, it is a great challenge to address

the exponential growth of global bandwidth; and more so to ensure the availability on a 7 x 24

basis, taking into account the natural and manmade calamities that can occur anywhere at

any time.

The transmission technologies today are going through major innovations and developments

to meet up the requirements of redundancy as well as capacity in the core communication

systems and networks. Various products, components and technology solutions are available

today  for strengthening the international core network infrastructure. Telecom  service

providers  are benefited by such technologies in addressing the  bandwidth  requirements as

well as ensuring the  availability  of links and networks. The  solutions or products can be

applied to the whole or parts of the systems according specific requirements, such as cutting

down operating costs, reducing latency, enhancing QoS, reducing complexity, enabling more

protection and restorability, and of course, ensuring redundancy.

Some of the new developments in submarine and terrestrial optical transmission technologies

are briefly described in this article. A number of these features might be implemented with the new submarine cable (for example, SEA-ME-WE-5), Bangladesh has planned to join and also, with the interconnecting submarine cable between the existing and the new one. 

Submarine & Terrestrial Optical  Cable Systems Using Coherent Detection Technology and Integrated on Simplified Architecture

The  global network  of today  is made of both undersea  submarine  and terrestrial network

segments linked together to connect almost all continents of the world.

In the present systems,  a submarine cable would land on the  Cable Landing Station (CLS),

which houses  equipment  pertaining to both  submarine  (or, wet)  and terrestrial  segments.

Usually, the major Point-of-Presence (POP)s would be placed in the terrestrial/metro network,

with a backhaul link running from the CLS to the said POPs. Traditionally, the submarine and

terrestrial systems had adopted different networking architectures and technologies.

However, the inefficient network demarcation point which is typically situated between the

SIE (SDH Interconnection Equipment) and Terrestrial LTE (Line Terminal Equipment) regarding the separation of submarine (wet) and  terrestrial (dry) segments could be  eliminated to facilitate an integrated system of core networking.

Use of relatively new optical transport technologies specially the coherent detection and the

Reconfigurable  Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers  (ROADMs) can  significantly compact  the CLS

network configuration, with most of the remaining functionality and associated equipment

physically relocated into the inland Metro/Terrestrial PoP making it a major data center. This

equipment relocation  can be  made possible  by virtue of the significantly increased

interconnections  offered  by  these two technology products:  coherent  detection and the

photonic switching capabilities of ROADMs.

The proprietary (related to specific vendors) implementation of this  coherent transmission

technology  in DSP (Digital Signal Processing) chipsets typically incorporates other important

functionalities such as Soft Forward Error Correction (soft FEC) which is adjustable for latency

and signal transmission distance according to requirements. This would significantly  increase

achievable distances  for signal transmission. Therefore, it is possible to move  the submarine

wavelength termination point from the CLS to inland  metro PoP, which opens up  new

possibilities for CLS and related designs. Incoming wavelengths from the submarine cable can

be optically switched inland using either fixed filters or flexible ROADMs. ROADMs also offer

remote control feature and is a key enabler of agile photonic networks. Furthermore, keeping

wavelengths in the optical domain for as long as possible reduces latency. The equipment

consumes less power and are of small footprint. Therefore,  the overall operational network

complexity is also reduced and the  global network  simplification and its associated benefits

increases service provider’s  competiveness.  The inefficient submarine-to-terrestrial network

demarcation point is eliminated by relocated SLTE functionality inland while switching

wavelengths from the submarine cable to the inland PoP or the next CLS.

 

SLTE functionality can also be  physically  integrated  with an intelligent switch which will

further eliminate inefficient client-side handoffs between  the  previously distinct  SLTE and

intelligent switches. This simplifies the global network even further by integrating more

traditional CLS functionality directly into the inland PoP;  only the switching of light will be

performed by the Wavelength Selective  Switch (WSS) within the ROADM  and  the  power

management system (PFE & others) will be still  in the CLS. Integrating SLTE functionality into

inland switches running a control plane will prospectively facilitate the formation of intelligent

mesh networks, which ensures bandwidth availability and network connectivity/redundancy.

The result of this convergence is the elimination of the demarcation point between what was

traditionally  been  referred to as  the  “submarine” and “terrestrial” networks. The ability to

seamlessly interconnect networks overland and undersea helps  to  achieve global networks

that are simpler to design, manage, and maintain. Also, end-to-end network security is much

strengthened as the traffic is carried in the optical domain from PoPs to PoPs, specially when

coherent transmission technology is used, as it is far harder to tap and decode when

compared to network nodes that allow for access to traffic in the electrical domain. The SLTE

relocated directly into the inland PoP  could be  easier to manage and protect  in general as

compared to a CLS physically located in a rather sparsely populated and remote beach area or coastline location.

Evolution of Network Intelligence and the Control Plane

The control plane  functions as the brain of an intelligent network which  autonomously

maintains an accurate database of all network resources to decide on the optimal connection.

It is essentially comprised of special hardware and software that make a self-aware network.

Traditional networks employ centralized intelligence, or network management software  that

runs on  an external workstation for connection management.  Networks with  intelligent

control planes  possess a sort of  nervous system through which connection management is

autonomously performed by the network itself, within predefined conditions. Connections are

autonomously created and deleted via machine-to-machine signaling and routing protocols.

However, a  mesh network governed by intelligent control  plane technology will  make

connection management, protection, and restoration decisions based on the policies created

by human operators and  the network operator is in complete control of an intelligent mesh

network at all times, although connections are autonomously created and deleted.  This

fundamental paradigm  shift in connection management, from an external centralized model

to an  internal decentralized model, brings network operators  some important advantages in

terms of rapid service provision. Significant savings in capital and operational expenditures are

made possible.

Technology Advancement through DWDM Modulation Techniques & PM-QPSK

The optical line terminal equipments of the present and near future need to be able to handle

very high speed traffic transported to a long distance. Advanced optical network technologies  

such as Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) form the  foundation for

communications infrastructures of today, enabling worldwide traffic aggregation and metro

and regional network consolidation. Because of the notable technical developments on the

DWDM components, it can be said that DWDM approaches have surpassed the time division

multiplexing (TDM) for the high speed transmission over long distance which can be even on a

single fiber instead of a pair of fibers for transmission and reception with a specific terminal.

The key breakthrough factor of the solution has been the coherent receiver. For the past

three decades or so, optical system receivers have been working by detection of the

transmitted signal’s intensity with on-off keying.

The bit-rate of a channel can be described as the simple product of the baud rate or symbol-

rate, bits per symbol and the number of carriers used. Recent commercial coherent systems at

40 Gbps and 100 Gbps have exploited all of these dimensions. The technology that made this

100 G transmission possible is Polarization Multiplexed QPSK modulation  (PM-QPSK) with a

coherent receiver. Modulation is required to ensure propagation, to perform multiple

accesses and to enhance the SNR, as well as to achieve bandwidth compression.  PM-QPSK

modulation technique would decrease the baud or symbol rate of the system, using four bits

per symbol, keeping the optical spectrum four times narrower than the unreduced baud rate.

Because of the capability to pass through multiple Optical Add-Drop Multiplexers (OADMs)

and its practical PMD (Polarization Mode Dispersion) tolerance, PM-QPSK is recognized as a

viable format for deployment within 50GHz-spaced systems. The present “state of the art” for

DWDM in 2012 or 2013 may be still 100 Gbps. However, the growth in the internet has

created requirement for new scale for bandwidth and that is preferably without adding any

more complexity to the operations. It is clear that for a high capacity network beyond the

100G, in addition to a move toward larger, more powerful transport switches, the

mechanisms of DWDM optical transmission may have to change.

Technology of ROADM

Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) are to deliver new flexibility to

DWDM networks by enabling dynamic, transparent optical wavelength add/drop functioning.  

ROADMs add considerable agility and robustness to network architectures, vastly improving

service and lowering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). ROADM Technology delivers greater

flexibility and cost  savings on optical transport platforms and enables add/drop  of optical

channels anywhere within an optical network linear  span or ring. These channels can be

wavelengths with any bandwidth  rate  2.5, 10, and 40 Gbps currently; 100 Gbps. ROADM

technology also allows traffic to pass through a network  location transparently in the optical

domain without Optical Electrical-Optical (OEO) conversions, as shown in Figure 1. ROADMs

ease the planning process for DWDM-based networks by allowing the addition, removal, or

modification  of one or more wavelength  channels within a network  automatically, with

minimal user  intervention. Thus, the new ROADM technology are now-a-days used to design

flexible and efficient branching units used in large submarine cable systems.

Application of new Technologies in the Consortium Submarine Cable

Existing SMW-4 cable is the only submarine cable that has kept Bangladesh connected with

the international information superhighway. Due to any calamity or other reasons, if this

cable gets  into any kind of physical damage or disruption, country’s international long

distance telecommunication would suffer badly. That’s why Bangladesh has been working for

long to acquire a second submarine cable so that the international links can be maintained

without outage.

It is expected that Bangladesh would join a consortium submarine cable. The prospective

submarine cable would be built using high capacity handling DWDM and Coherent detection

technology, and highly flexible ROADM. Depending on the supplier’s equipment, it is likely

that sophisticated intelligent control plane technology will be implemented.

Bangladesh will join as a branch party to this submarine cable. While the cost per party will

depend on various factors, the cost can be reduced if the branch can be shared with another

party. There is a possibility that Myanmar might  join  the Consortium  and share the branch

cable with Bangladesh. In that case, Bangladesh could save as much as 10 million US Dollars.

The “Branch on Branch” architecture for Branch sharing  might  be implemented in various

ways. Some typical situations are as given in the figures (Fig.2, 3 & 4):

Interconnecting Submarine Cable Between the Landing Stations  and DWDM Transmission Backbone

A plan has been made to interconnect the two submarine cable systems through another

submarine cable. In this way, the two landing stations Cox’s Bazar (for SMW-4) and Kuakata

(proposed for the second submarine cable) would get interlinked.

The estimated length of this link would be 235 Km. It would be made of 2 (two) fiber pairs

with an initial capacity of 100 Gbps/per fiber pair and 16 Tbps as design capacity. The

modulation scheme to be used: PM-QPSK (Polarization Multiplexed- Quadrature Phase Shift

Keying). Other important feature is this submarine cable would be a repeater less system with

a design life of about 25 years.  

The Interconnecting Submarine cable is shown in Fig.5

Fig.5: Proposed Interconnecting Submarine Cable Between the Two Landing Stations: Kuakata and Cox’s Bazar

The two submarine cable systems will also be interconnected through a terrestrial  DWDM

backbone, shown in Fig.6

Therefore, interconnection through both the Submarine Cable and Terrestrial Systems will

ensure the strong security and redundancy in the Submarine Cable Infrastructure of Bangladesh which will keep the core communication infrastructure seamlessly connected to the Information Superhighway.

References

1.  Optical Fiber Telecommunications part V- vol. B (Systems and Networks) edited by I. P.

Kaminow,T. Li & A. E. Willner

2.  Fiber Optics Engineering by M. Azadeh

3.  Performance of Dual-Polarization QPSK for Optical Transport Systems by K. Roberts, M.

O’Sullivan, K. T. Wu, H. Sun, A. Awadalla, D. J. Krause, & C. Laperle

4.  Digital Coherent Receiver Technology for 100 Gb/s Optical Transport Systems by J. C.

Rasmussen, T. Hoshida & H. Nakashima

5.  Introduction to DWDM Technology by Cisco Systems

6.  Optical Internetworking Forum: http://www.oiforum.com/

7.  Suboptic Forum: www.suboptic.org

8.  www.huaweimarine.com

9.  www.alcatel-lucent.com/submarine/

10. www.infinera.com

11. Latest Technology of Optical Transmission System (40G/100G Solutions) Deployed in

SMW-4 Submarine Cable Upgrade and the Bandwidth Situation in Bangladesh by Md.

Monwar Hossain & Parvez M. Ashraf (published in Teletech 2011)
________________________________________________________________________

Md. Monwar Hossain: Managing Director, BSCCL
Parvez M. Ashraf: Deputy General Manager (Bandwidth Planning), BSCCL

Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (100 G Solution) adopted in SMW-5 Submarine Cable System - What is in the Laboratory for Higher Bandwidth Solution?

Md. Monwar Hossain *

Parvez M. Ashraf **

Introduction

Ever since the internet from the research lab of the scientists and engineers came into the people’s world during the 1990’s, there had been exponential growth of demand for bandwidth. The society and the economy started to be shaped by the wide spread use of internet. Today internet has put its spell on people with numerous features such as browsing, emailing, blogging, twitting, facebooking, online gaming, conferencing, audio/video streaming, internet TV, etc. Having access to high speed (or, in other term, high capacity) triple play (voice, data and video) communication for various business and non-business oriented activities has become the norm of today’s students, educators, researchers, professionals and other people.

So meeting the rapidly increasing demand for capacity in the global and national information superhighways is a great challenge as ever, making the telecommunication technology today to go through major innovations and developments to meet up the capacity requirements in the core communication systems and networks. As we have indicated in a Teletech article last year, the exponential growth of Bandwidth demand has made the 10 and 40 G technology of optical networking insufficient to meet future needs.

The SMW-4 Consortium’s Submarine Cable system was originally built with 10 G systems but it is now being upgraded with 40 G and 100 G technologies. BSCCL has been a member of the SMW-4 and also became a party of the newly formed SMW-5 Submarine cable consortium with a bid to join Bangladesh to a second submarine cable. SMW-5 cable has been planned based on the 100 G technology, which is now more matured and has become the standard since more than a couple of years. We hope that by the year 2014 Bangladesh will be able to take advantage of a technologically advanced system made althrough by using the 100 G technology.

2. Status of 100 G Technology

Fig. 1: A comparison between the Constellation points at different modulation schemes at bit rate 46 Gbps (aprrox. 40 Gbps)

The optical line terminal equipments of the present and near future need to be able to handle very high speed traffic transported to a long distance. Because of the notable technical

Fig. 2: A depiction of BER vs OSNR at different modulation schemes at bit rate 46 Gbps (aprrox. 40 Gbps)

developments on the DWDM components, it can be said that DWDM approaches have surpassed the time division multiplexing (TDM) for the high speed transmission over long distance which can be even on a single fiber instead of a pair of fibers for transmission and reception with a specific terminal. The economic and technical challenges associated with achieving a 100G transmission solution has been overcome within the last 4 years. 100Gbps error free transmission has been demonstrated in 2008 by companies such as the Nortel (now, Ciena), at the Optical Fiber Conference/National Fiber Optical Engineer Conference. The key breakthrough factor of the solution has been the coherent receiver. For the past three decades or so, optical system receivers have been working by detection of the transmitted signal’s intensity with on-off keying.

A coherent receiver operates by mixing a local oscillator and the incoming signal to be received. If the local oscillator is tuned into the frequency of the incoming signal, then only the information from the incoming signal is extracted, and neighboring channel information is ignored, thus unwanted signal elimination became much better. Most vendors basically applied this method towards solving optical transmission challenges at higher line rates.

The bit-rate of a channel can be described as the simple product of the baud rate or symbol-rate, bits per symbol and the number of carriers used. Recent commercial coherent systems at 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps have exploited all of these dimensions. The technology that made this

Fig. 3: Coherent 100 G System

100 G transmission possible is Dual Polarization QPSK modulation (DP-QPSK) with a coherent receiver. Modulation is required to ensure propagation, to perform multiple accesses and to enhance the SNR, as well as to achieve bandwidth compression. DP-QPSK modulation technique would decrease the baud or symbol rate of the system, using four bits per symbol, keeping the optical spectrum four times narrower than the unreduced baud rate. Because of the capability to pass through multiple Optical Add-Drop Multiplexers (OADMs) and its practical PMD (Polarization Mode Dispersion) tolerance, DP-QPSK is recognized as a viable format for deployment within 50GHz-spaced systems.

3. SEA-ME-WE-5

Fig. 4: Proposed Route Diagram of SMW-5 (Bangladesh will join through a branch cable with the main cable)

Existing SMW-4 cable is the only submarine cable that has kept Bangladesh connected with the international information superhighway. Due to any calamity or other reasons, if this cable get into any kind of physical damage or disruption, country’s international long distance telecommunication would suffer badly. That’s why Bangladesh has been working for long to acquire a second submarine cable so that the international links can be maintained without outage. In this sequence of efforts, Bangladesh established contact with a new consortium,

SEA-ME-WE-5, and already signed a MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with the Consortium. Initially, there will be 16 parties in the Consortium. The submarine cable this time will extend from Japan up to London for a total of 25000 Km. The estimated cost for joining this project is 48 million USD for Bangladesh. However, the cost will be reduced to 38 million USD if Myanmar joins and shares the branch cable with Bangladesh. Bangladesh might get 17 lambda of 100 Gbps capacity for each altogether coming to 1700 Gbps. Upto now, the Landing Station of the second submarine cable has been planned to be in Mongla of Bagerhat district. The physical infrastructure of the Landing Station is expected to be built by 2012-2013. It is expected that by the end of 2014, the process of joining of Bangladesh with a second submarine cable will be completed.

Fig. 5: System Configuration Diagram (proposed) of SMW-5

4. Beyond 100 G Technology: Coherent Systems, Super channels or Optical OFDM might be the solutions

In the recent years, due to the new developments in polarization multiplexed phase modulated DWDM transmission over long distance, optical coherent detection, sophisticated DSP (Digital Signal Processing) and high performance ICs (application specific integrated circuits or ASICs), the transceiver equipment for optical transmission is emerging with high

level of capacity & sophistication. Specially, coherent detection has made possible to choose among wide range of modulation formats, such as the use of dual polarization or multiple sub-carriers. Also, use of digital signal processing techniques for leveling out various linear and nonlinear impairments has become viable with coherent detection. It has been practically found that the coherent systems can provide robust tolerance against unwanted transient signals. Therefore, the future high speed and high performance transmission systems are expected to be based on coherent systems. Optical coherent systems are likely to bring future optical transmission systems at 200 G, 400 G, and later 1 (one) Terra or 1000 G systems.

DWDM is considered as an important technique enabling multiple optical carriers to travel in coexistence in parallel through a fiber that facilitates more efficient use of the expensive fibers over thousands of Kilometers. The present “state of the art” for DWDM in 2012 or 2013 may be still 100 Gbps. However, the growth in the internet has created requirement for new scale for bandwidth and that is preferably without adding any more complexity to the operations. It is clear that for a high capacity network beyond the 100G, in addition to a move toward larger, more powerful transport switches, the mechanisms of DWDM optical transmission may have to change.

Fig. 6: Bandwidth Virtualization with Super-channels

A new approach to DWDM capacity, the super-channel could be an effective solution to the challenges posed by today’s internet growth. In simple terms, the super-channel is an evolution in DWDM in which several optical carriers are combined to create a composite line side signal of the desired capacity, and which is provisioned in one operational cycle. It could be more practical to combine multiple carriers into a super-channel to move beyond 100 Gbps than it is to simply increase the data rate of an individual carrier. However super-channels are indistinguishable from a single carrier channel of the same data rate as long as normal end

users are concerned. Similar to CPU multi core processing the concept of super channels resemble to Bandwidth virtualization through multi-carrier techniques. DWDM super channels have the potential to offer an ideal solution to the problems of increasing optical transport capacity beyond 100 Gbps, up to 1 (one) Terra bps. This will also provide reduction in complexity with electronic circuitry by using large scale PICs (Photonic Integrated Circuit).

Bangladesh entering into a Consortium Submarine Cable

Md. Monwar Hossain
GM/PD, Submarine Cable Project. BTTB (2003)


1. History of Submarine Cable :

Anybody dealing with Telecommunication will be curious to know as to when the first Submarine cable was laid. It is for their information that TAT-1 was the first trans-Atlantic telephone cable, which was laid in 1956. It was a coaxial cable catering for four thousand voice circuits but coaxial cable with it repeaters was running with technological limitations. So fiber optics Submarine cable brought forth the new solution overcoming the technological difficulties. In 1983 TAT-8 was the first optical fiber cable, which contained two pairs of single mode fibers carrying 35 thousand telephone circuits across the Atlantic.

2. Shark biting the fiber optic cable

[AT&T’s] Submarine Systems division carefully planned another test of TAT-8 technology in the Canary Islands of Africa, where the Spanish telephone authority wanted a link between Grand Canary and Tenerife Islands.

Sharks had ignored coaxial cables. Why should they turn their razor-sharp teeth on fiber. [It turned out] the electric field from the current attracted the predators, who apparently use it in hunting. Coaxial cable also carried a current, but its outer metal wrap blocked the electric field from reaching into the water. Nothing blocked the field from reaching the water around the fiber cable, where the sharks could sense it. Hence Engineers had to provide protection on FOC Submarine cable against shark biting.

3. Bangladesh efforts to be connected to Submarine Cable

Bangladesh T&T Board first prepared a project concept paper on 12th Jan 1998 regarding a Submarine Cable project. Bangladesh was making efforts to join (a) SEA-ME-WE-3, (b) SAFE and (c) Oxygen, three Submarine Cables materializing almost in similar time span.

On 4th Oct 2000, ECNEC approved a project namely “Establishment of International connectivity through Submarine Cable System” and the total project cost was 921.18 cr. BTTB invited International tender on 16th Aug 2001 for this project. After evaluation the case was sent to the Ministry for further process in the Inter-Ministerial committee.

It was at that stage while 3 (three) inter-Ministerial meetings were held to discuss the bids, Bangladesh received the first invitation to join a Consortium Cable.


4. The Consortium Cable, SEA-ME-WE-4

This cable covers South-East Asia, Middle East, Western Europe-4, starting from Singapore to France. The total length of the consortium cable will be about 21000km and 14 parties have shown interest and singed the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to develop a consortium FOC cable.

The following are the 14 Potential Initial Parties (PIP’s) who signed the MOU on 4th Sept 2002 in Bali of Indonesia;

Indosat (Indonesia)
Telecom Malaysia (Malaysia)
SingTel (Singapore)
Bharati (India)
VSNL (India)
BTTB (Bangladesh)
STL (Srilanka Telecom Ltd)
Etisalat (UAE)
STC (Saudi Telecom Corporation)
World com (England)
TE (Telecom Egypt)
TI (Telecom Italia)
PTCL (Pakistan Telecom Co. Ltd)
FT (French Telecom).

There have been already 7 meetings of the consortium in various member countries. Tender Documents for the FOC cable are almost ready and it is expected to sign the Suppliers contract by Nov 2003.

For Bangladesh the landing station will be at Cox’s Bazar and therefore BTTB has to develop a FOC link between Cox’s Bazar and Chittagong.

Two more new landing parties have been considered for inclusion in the Consortium, they are;

CAT - Thailand.
Tunisie Telecom - Tunisia.
Few non-landing parties are also under consideration of the Management Committee for inclusion in the consortium.

The minimum Investment level in this Consortium Cable has been 30 million USD. Normally for the Branching parties, each party has to spend for its own branch cost (50 million USD for Bangladesh branch, 1240 Km) and 15 m USD should be the contribution towards the express way. It is worth mentioning here that the total route will have 2 fiber pairs (One pair for branches and one pair will touch the full landing stations only). The total project in expected to be completed by 1st quarter of 2005.

5. System Configuration :

Total four segment , namely segment 1, 2,3 & 4 will be constructed in SMW4 consortium cable that will run from Tuas ( Singapore ) to Marseilles ( France ). The details of the segments are :

Segment 1 :
Segment 1a shall contain two fibre pairs where one fibre pair is directly connected between Tuas (Singapore) and Chennai (India) and the other fibre pair is connected between Tuas and Chennai with branches to Melaka (Malaysia), Medan (Indonesia), Satun ( Thailand ) and Cox’s Bazar (Bangladesh) .

Segment 1b shall contain two fibre pairs where one fibre pair is directly connected between Channai and Mumbai and other fibre pair is connected between Channai and Mumbai with a branch to Colombo.

Segment 2 :
Segment 2a shall contain two fibre pairs one fibre pair is directly connected to Mumbai and Jeddah and other pair is connected to Mumbai and Jeddah with branches to Karachi (Pakistan) and Fajairah (UAE).

Segment 2b shall contain two fiber pairs where both pair are directly connected between Jeddah and Suez(Egypt).

Segment 3 :
Two fibre pairs will run through Suez, Cairo and Alexandria. This a land Cable
( Terrestrial Segment ).

Segment 4 :
Segment 4 shall contain two fibre pairs where one fibre pair is directly connected between Alexandria and Marseilles (France) and the other fibre pair is connected between Alexandria and Marseilles with branches to Palermo (Italy) and Bizerte ( Tunisia ).

A route diagram of the cable is annexed with this article as annex – 1.

6. Capacity :

1) Using WDM ( Wave Division Multiplexing ) technology with a design capacity of at least 64x10 Gbit/s transmission per fibre pair ( FP ).For two FPs it will be 1.28 Tbit/sec.
In WDM system 64 wave length (λ) can be transmitted through one FP and 10 Gbit/sec for each wave length ( λ ).

2) Initially it will start with 8x10 Gbit/sec on each fibre pair (FP) and capable of being equipped in multiples of 8 x 10 Gbit/sec per FP.




7. Advantage for Bangladesh to join a Consortium Submarine Cable rather than having its own Submarine Cable

(a) Bangladesh will get an initial capacity of 10Gbps, which will cater for next few years. Any additional capacity can be procured through some incremental payment to the Consortium and the capacity can be enhanced up to 100 Gbit/s.

(b) The operation and maintenance of the Submarine Consortium cable will be the full responsibility of the Consortium and it would be cheaper for Bangladesh. On the contrary, if Bangladesh possesses its own Submarine cable, she has to sign another operation and maintenance agreement with a third party and this agreement will be definitely costly. Bangladesh neither has the skill manpower or equipment/ship for operation and maintenance of the Submarine cable nor does it have any experience since this Consortium cable will be the first Submarine cable in the country.

(c) Bangladesh will get free landing entry into the 12 member countries and bilateral traffic can be sent through half circuit basis.

(d) The project cost in the Consortium will be much cheaper than Bangladesh having its own Submarine Cable.

(e) This Consortium cable will provide us with sufficient bandwidth for ICT expansion and software export/data transmission at a much cheaper rate. Bangladesh having a Submarine cable connectivity internationally will open up a new era of communication which will not only encourage telecommunication at a cheaper rate (no delay in communication, less noisy, faster and smoother seamless communication can be achieved) but also will have enormous opportunities in respect of software export, data entry, call centers etc in order to earn foreign currency.