Md. Monwar Hossain Parvez M. Ashraf
Introduction
Bangladesh
possesses great potentials in the ICT and Telecommunication sectors. As we are
regularly experiencing, there is an increasing trend of using computers and
availing mobile phone facilities or even the Tabs in the rural areas as in the
urban areas of the Country. Bangladesh has got natural competitive advantage in
terms of manpower, location and cost for establishing very promising Call
Center or Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industries. Many young talents of
the Country are already involved in IT related jobs like- Programming, Software
development and outsourcing works, and thus the Software industry in Bangladesh
has become flourishing with the continuous and restless efforts of the
energetic Bangladeshi entrepreneurs within the last few years. Opening and
widening up the opportunities with proper Government initiatives and support of
the private sector can build a strong IT based infrastructure. The global ICT
market has already appraised about the skills and standards of the Bangladeshi
talents. However, all these services and
activities related to IT would depend heavily on the internet and International
data connectivity. Presently there are
around 120 million mobile phone users and around 44 million Internet users in
the country. In addition to usage of mobile phones for voice calls, there is a
substantial increase in internet usage through mobile communications in rural and
urban areas. ICT and Telecommunication services are getting increasingly
popular to the people because these sectors have contributed much in changing
their economic condition to a higher level. It is because of the Submarine
Cable, that various service providers such as IIG, IGW, BWA, etc. have been
benefitted and Internet traffic for both Voice and Data has increased
exponentially in Telecommunication industry of Bangladesh. With the efficient
and effective utilization of the enormous potentials of the Submarine Cable, the
Telecommunications and ICT sector promises a significant contribution to the
economy of Bangladesh to boost the nation into a middle income country soon.
Role of
the Submarine Cable in Expansion of Broadband Internet in Bangladesh
In the past, before the submarine
cable era started in Bangladesh, the long distance telecommunication of
Bangladesh was dependent on Satellite systems with severe limitation of
bandwidth and speed of communication. We have become aware now that the
availability of Internet with high magnitude of bandwidth has great impact on
the economic development of the country. Becoming a member of South East Asia- Middle East-Western
Europe-4 (SEA-ME-WE-4) consortium, Bangladesh received initial capacity of 7.5
Gbps. Presently, capacity of Bangladesh in SEA-ME-WE-4 submarine Cable System
of BSCCL is around 200 Gbps. In recent years, as a result of
connecting with submarine cable system there were rapid expansions of the
broadband internet industry, resulting in over 180 registered ISP's by 2005 and
the number of Internet subscriptions grew from 186,000 in 2000 to 617,300 in
2009. According to official reports, in Bangladesh the total number of Internet
Subscribers has reached 36.25 million at the end of August 2013 which
is around 23% of the total population.
The
Submarine Cable under BSCCL could provide services to the subscribers at much
cheaper price than others as BSCCL would be able to connect many international
IP transit points with its own submarine cable system. Bangladesh would expect
good revenue earnings by introducing licenses for these services. As a result
of connecting with the submarine cable system there were rapid expansions of
the broadband internet industry. Keeping the “Vision 2021, Digital Bangladesh”
in view, the Government of Bangladesh has exclusive plans to extend the
broadband internet and telecommunication facilities for the benefits of the
people as elaborated in Government’s ILDTS (International Long Distance
Telecommunication Service), Broadband and ICT Policies: the Broadband
Penetration rate required to be pulled up from 7% (2011) to 30% within year
2015, by 2015, all the union councils are needed to be under the broadband
network, by 2013, about 1.7 million educational institutions (schools and
colleges) were supposed to be provided with broadband connections, etc. Already
the DCs (District Commissioners) and ADCs are connected; and 1000 Union Councils
would be connected through optical fibers and fiber optic connectivity will
reach Upazilla Health Centers to provide access to information,
video conferencing, telemedicine, etc. The Government has formulated the new
standard of Broadband and the bandwidth has to be at least 5 Mbps to meet that
standard. To implement the policies and the Vision 2021, a large amount of
bandwidth needs to be made available to the Government which will be provided
by the Submarine Cable.
After catering for the needs for
bandwidth inside the country, Bangladesh has still got opportunities to lease out submarine cable bandwidth to land locked
neighboring countries like Nepal and Bhutan. BSCCL is presently working to
design for links to Indian North-Eastern provinces for transport of IP transit
as below;
(a) Cox’s Bazar – Chittagong – Comilla – B. baria – Akhaura –
Agortola
(b) Cox’s Bazar –
Chittagong – Comilla – B. baria – Sylhet – Tamabil – Shilong (Meghalaya).
There is a demand
of BSCCL bandwidth in Myanmar also. If BSCCL could be involved to tap the
Telecom requirements of those parts of the Globe, it could earn a good deal of
foreign currency during the life-times of the submarine cables.
Principal
products and services of BSCCL
Bangladesh
Submarine Cable Company Limited (BSCCL) is an International Long Distance
Communications and International Internet Gateway (IIG) operator that provides
various Telecommunications services through the Submarine Cable network.
BSCCL
has a Submarine Cable Landing Station located at Jhilongja, Cox’s Bazar from
where Backhaul Service Providers are connected. Clients can connect their fiber
optic cable for IPLC (International Private Leased Circuits) service from
co-location centers (Presently at Chittagong, Mohakhali/Dhaka and Moghbazar) of
Backhaul Service Providers. Moreover, with a view to provide multiple options for
backhaul connectivity, a co-location centre has been established in Cox's bazar
landing station. BSCCL's valued clients can choose their backhaul providers who
could directly connect their fibers at the co-location centers of BSCCL. BSCCL
is the root service provider of submarine cable bandwidth and handles country’s
only submarine cable. Presently, BSCCL is providing the following services:
- Bandwidth service for different routes and different
levels such as STM-1, STM-4, STM-16 to the International Internet Gateway
(IIG) companies through International Private Leased Circuits (IPLC).
- Bandwidth service for different routes and different
levels such as STM-1, STM-4, STM-16 to the International (Voice) Gateway
(IGW) companies.
- IP Transit Services to IIG companies
- IPLC services to any Corporate Customers as per the
approval of telecommunications regulatory body of Bangladesh.
- IIG (International Internet Gateway) which should help the people to get broadband Internet with cheaper rate and better quality of service.
Presently, the
Company offers the following products:
- IPLC
(International Private Leased Circuit) for IIG
- IPLC
(International Private Leased Circuit) for IGW
- IPLC
(International Private Leased Circuit) with IP Transit for IIG
- IIG
(International Internet Gateway) Services for ISP
- Dedicated
Leased Circuits for Corporate Clients
An International
Private Leased Circuit (IPLC) is a dedicated end-to-end connectivity between
any two points of locations. It is suitable for IIG, IGW and also for International
& National Organizations/Corporations (who require reliable & secure
links with committed bandwidth for data/voice/video/internet communications
between their offices).
Key Benefits of
BSCCL’s IPLC and Internet Gateway services are the following:
1)
High
Bandwidth Dedicated Full Duplex Digital Communication
2)
Private,
Reliable & Secure
3)
Fast,
Efficient & Error free
4)
Global
Reach through India, Malaysia, Singapore, Middle East & Europe.
5)
One
Stop Shopping Facilities
6)
24
x 7 Tech Support
7)
Constant
exchange of Data, Voice, Video, etc. in large volumes & in various formats
between multiple destinations.
Joining
with the Second 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 achieve
redundancy for the existing SEA-ME-WE-4 (SMW-4) Submarine Cable as it is a
necessity for the country to support for Internet and voice traffic during
outage in the SMW-4 cable.
The new
SEA-ME-WE-5 (SMW-5) cable will be another submarine cable connecting South East
Asia with Western Europe through Middle East and Africa. The cable would also
be extended to Hong Kong and Japan. Bangladesh
will join as a branch party to this submarine cable. BSCCL worked with the
SMW-5 Consortium for implementation of a Branch Sharing arrangement with
Myanmar through the “Branch on Branch” architecture, which has helped
Bangladesh to reduce the cost in a significant way.
SMW-5 Submarine
Cable System will be a 100G DWDM based 20,000 Km long repeatered system that is
planned to connect eighteen (18) landing stations. The system will be built with three
(3) fiber pairs having 80 λ/fiber-pair
(λ, pronounced as “lambda”, is the Greek letter for wavelength of Light),
so 80 x 100 Gbps = 8
(eight) Terabits per second capacity for each fiber pair; thus providing a very
high design capacity of 24 Terabits per second.
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.
Alcatel-Lucent of France and NEC of Japan
have been selected for jointly work on building the system. Both suppliers will use their latest high
performance equipments, cable and systems using efficient DWDM, Polarization
Division Multiplexed Digital Phase Modulation/Quadrature Phase Shift Keying
(PDM-QPSK or DP-QPSK) and Coherent detection technologies, with highly flexible
ROADMs (Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexer) along the links.
The Submarine Line Terminal Equipments
(SLTEs) will handle very high speed traffic transported to a long distance; and
the system will be extremely reliable with sufficient protection schemes and
high speed automatic protection switching.
Advantages
of joining the SMW-5 Consortium
Joining the SMW-5 cable consortium
is expected to bring about a number of benefits for both BSCCL as a submarine
cable company, and Bangladesh, as a country. Some of those benefits are
described below:
(i) For
extending the voice traffic to different parts of the World particularly Middle
East, Europe and America, Bangladesh can have chances to reach these
destinations almost without any extra charges.
(ii) For
IP Transit, Bangladesh would have multi-choices to bring IP bandwidth at a
cheaper rate covering both east & west side destinations. This means that
BSCCL shall have better opportunity to arrange its traffic (IP) from cheaper
destinations of East & West.
(iii) Bangladesh as a country would enjoy the total benefit of redundancy of the circuits & also the multiple destinations for SMW-5.
(iv) The
unit cost for bandwidth would be much cheaper in case of SMW-5 cable. Moreover,
the adaptation of future technology for future expansion can be easy
approachable.
(v) There
would be a very good opportunity to flourish BPO industries (Call centers, data
entry, Software export etc) in Bangladesh with the support of two submarine
cable communication systems.
An additional
plan has also been made by BSCCL to interconnect the two submarine cable
Landing Stations of Bangladesh with a submarine cable. In this way, the two
landing stations Cox’s Bazar (for SMW-4) and Kuakata (for SMW-5) will be
interlinked. The estimated length of this link is estimated as of the length of
350 Km. It is planned to be made of 2 (two) fiber pairs with an initial
capacity of 100 Gbps/per fiber pair and 16 Tbps as design capacity. Other
important feature proposed in this submarine cable system is that this would be
a repeater less system with a design life of about 25 years. The two submarine
cable systems will also be interconnected through a terrestrial DWDM backbone.
However, there are vulnerabilities of cable cuts at any location along the
route of the terrestrial system, and the interconnection through both the
Submarine Cable and Terrestrial System working as a ring 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.
Conclusion
The network of submarine or undersea cables around the earth has made
today’s broadband internet very fast. It further holds the potential of
offering more data transmission capacity.
The global network of today is made of extensive undersea submarine and
terrestrial network segments linked together to connect almost all continents
of the world. With the development of branching units, more than one
destination can be served by a single cable system. Now-a-days, a vast majority
of the international traffic is carried by the submarine cables. The
reliability of submarine cables is considered high, as multiple paths can be
made available in the event of a cable break. Also, the typical information
carrying capacity of a single optical fiber in the submarine cables is several
terabits per second (Tbps) with such small latencies as just a few milliseconds
(ms). It is almost impossible for any other system to match with these
submarine cable systems in terms of signal quality, bit-rate (capacity) and
latency. Thus, there is a good demand for the optical submarine cable links and
these have become national assets to the owner countries.
References
- Alcatel: www.alcatel-lucent.com/submarine/
- NEC: http://www.nec.com/en/global/prod/nw/submarine/index.html
- Optical Internetworking Forum: http://www.oiforum.com/
- Telegeography: www.telegeography.com
- Suboptic Forum: www.suboptic.org
- Infinera: www.infinera.com
- Optical Fiber Telecommunications part V- vol. B
(Systems and Networks) edited
by I. P. Kaminow,T. Li & A. E. Willner
- 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
- 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)
- Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (100 G
Solution) adopted in SMW-5 Submarine Cable System - What is in the
Laboratory for Higher Bandwidth Solution? by Md. Monwar Hossain &
Parvez M. Ashraf (published in Teletech 2012)
- Use of Advanced Optical Transmission Technologies
for Redundancy in the Submarine Cable Systems of Bangladesh by Md. Monwar Hossain &
Parvez M. Ashraf (published in Teletech 2013)
- Joining Bangladesh with the Second Submarine Cable
(SEA-ME-WE-5) by
Md. Monwar Hossain & Parvez M. Ashraf (published in Teletech 2014)
- Acknowledgment: Mr. Md. Zakirul Alam,
DGM (Development), BSCCL for Information & diagrams on SMW-5
Project & Mr. Abdul Wahhab, DGM (IIG), BSCCL for the Information &
diagrams on IIG and IP Transit Setups.
________________________________________________________________________
Md. Monwar Hossain: Managing Director, BSCCL
Parvez M. Ashraf: Deputy General Manager (Bandwidth Planning), BSCCL
