Tag Archives: fibre optic
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Asia-Pacific region leads high-speed Broadband connectivity, but wide divide prevails, says ITU
While some Asia-Pacific economies are world leaders in information and communication technologies (ICT) where broadband access is ultra-high speed, affordable and close to ubiquitous, in most of the region’s poorer countries Internet access remains limited and predominantly low-speed.
This is what ITU’s Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Report for the Asia-Pacific region 2008 says. It was released at ITU TELECOM ASIA 2008, Bangkok, Thailand yesterday (Sept 2, 2008).
The Report finds evidence that ICTs and broadband uptake foster growth and development, but the question remains as to the optimal speed that should be targeted in view of limited resources.
The area in which the region really stands out is the uptake of advanced Internet technologies, especially broadband Internet access. The Asia-Pacific region is the world’s largest broadband market with a 39 per cent share of the world’s total at the end of 2007. In terms of broadband access, Asia-Pacific has made remarkable progress in the past few years, with subscriber numbers growing almost five-fold in five years: from 27 million at the beginning of 2003 to 133 million at the start of 2008.
In the region’s high-income economies, ubiquitous access is progressing through a competitive race to provide ever faster fixed broadband access. Operators in Hong Kong ..read more
Seacom laying Africa undersea cable
Mauritius-based private equity venture Seacom has started the construction of a fibre optic cable that will link southern and east Africa with India and Europe.
The $650 million project covers more than 15,000 kilometres to link South Africa to India and France through Mozambique, Madagascar, Kenya and Tanzania. It is expected to provide first broadband access to countries in East Africa, which are currently using satellite connections.
In a similar project, NEPAD e-Africa Commission signed a deal with an American firm 5-P Holdings in November 2007 for the construction of an undersea submarine cable to link every country in Africa with the outside world.
This is a joint project between African investors and US telecommunications development company Herakles Telecom. The cable will be ready to serve southern and eastern Africa from 2009 onwards. Read more.
Click here to see Alcatel-Lucent’s animations of laying and repairing of submarine cable.
Bangladesh cable goes down a second time (and comes back after 10 hours)
I guess this is a lesson in the value of redundancy.
:: bdnews24.com :: The Chittagong-Cox’s Bazar fibre optic transmission link with the country’s only submarine cable was back up after about 10 hours of disruptions through Monday, an official with the BTTB said.
The breakdown of the link created “congestion” in the overseas phone and disrupted internet services.
The transmission link came back up at 00:25am Tuesday after it snapped at 2:30pm Monday, according to Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board.
In a statement, BTTB said the link snapped at Chokoria, some 120 kilometres off Chittagong towards Cox’s Bazar, the second time it has gone down with in a week.
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Dialog unveils network expansion plans
Sri Lanka’s Dialog Telekom has signed an investment agreement with the Board of Investment of Sri Lanka (BoI) to invest a further US$300 million in the country’s Telecoms and Media sectors within the next 2 years.
A substantial portion of the total investment will be in fixed line Telephony and Broadband services via Dialog Broadband Networks (DBN), and Digital Television Broadcast services via Asset Media, respectively.
The investments in DBN will be directed towards the growth of CDMA-based Rural Fixed Telecommunications Infrastructure, WiMax based wireless broadband infrastructure and for the deployment of a National Fibre Optic backbone. Read more.
Vietnam’s submarine cable ‘lost’ and ‘found’
Dhaka, June 1 (bdnews24.com)—Maritime thieves have stolen at least 11-kilometres Vietnamese portion of Thailand bound SEA-ME-WE3 submarine cable and sold the 100 tons of illicit cargo as scrap, reported VietNamNet Bridge online newspaper Tuesday.
Such bizarre underwater international telecoms infrastructure robbery occurred on March 25 and since then Vietnam’s Internet users have been struggling with far slower speed.
The broken cable system, named TVH, was built in 1993-1995, connecting Thailand, Vietnam and Hong Kong with a capacity of 560 megabits per second.
The Vietnam Telecom International (VTI) got puzzled when the cable went down. It occurred soon after the Asia Pacific region recovered from prolonged bandwidth crisis as earthquake snapped bunch of submarine cables in the Taiwanese coast
VTI called a submarine cable fixing ship from Singapore. But its crew went bonkers after detecting 11-kilometres of the cable was missing from the floor of Ca Mau Sea. The maintenance vessel went back as it never carries that many cables in the first place.
Non-transparent licensing for Palapa Ring project?
Licenses have been granted to consortium members for building the Palapa Ring–backbone that will connect the Eastern part of Indonesia that currently relies on satellites with the rest of the country. It is not clear how the licenses were granted and what are the fees and obligations of the license holders. Furthermore, technical and financial feasibility studies are yet to be completed. No access regimes have been developed that will govern how non-consortium members will be able to access the Palapa Ring and on what terms. There couldn’t be a worse possible way of launching such a complex, capital-intensive project that is supposed to transform the ICT infrastructure of Indonesia.
President SB Yudhoyono’s government came to power on the promise of eradicating corruption and the “deal culture” that has plagued Indonesia throughout much of its existence. Initially the government promised leased-cost subsidy auction and other open transparent methods for rolling out backbone infrastructure in the country. Now a sudden announcement in the media informs us that licenses for the Palapa Ring project have been granted.
The Palapa Ring has been a “dream” project of the Indonesian government even before the financial crisis of 1997. Before the crisis it was planning on ..read more
More on Maldives
Several weeks ago we speculated on why the Maldives, with its tiny population, needed two undersea cables. The answer is that the first cable is a collaboration between the new entrant Wataniya and India’s disruptive competitor, Reliance (through its FLAG unit). This created enormous pressure on the complacent incumbent Dhiraagu, the result being the cable to Colombo.
A new fibre optic undersea cable that connects Maldives to Sri Lanka will bring down international call charges from the Indian Ocean coral atoll, officials said Tuesday.Until the cable was commissioned this month, bilateral traffic of 600,000 minutes per month was routed via more expensive satellite links.
The undersea cable is a 20 million US dollar joint venture between Sri Lanka Telecom, owned by Japan’s NTT and the government of Sri Lanka and the Maldive state telecom firm, Dhiraagu.
“We expect call charges to fall,” Sri Lanka Telecom Chief Executive Officer Shoji Takahashi said.
Fiber network in Jaffna?
From the Daily Mirror (Sri Lanka) of 10 March 2006:
“Minister Bogollagama also noted that the government was planning to construct a fibre optic network in Jaffna to introduce the Business Process Outsourcing industry to the area.”
Jaffna is currently connected to the rest of Sri Lanka and the world by satellite. It is intriguing to speculate how the Minister’s fiber optic network will function and who will manage it.
One assumes that for it to be of use for the BPO industry, the Minister’s fiber will have to connect to another fiber somewhere. Will this be overland, along the A9 and through LTTE controlled territory or undersea?
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