:: bdnews24.com ::

The optical fibre link of the BTTB that connects the country with its online submarine cable system snapped at about 10pm Wednesday on Chittagong-Cox’s Bazar highway, some 96km south of Chittagong.

The disruption has upset Bangladesh’s online and internet telephone links with the rest of the world.

Miscreants damaged the cable on a bridge, a BTTB official alleged.

Powered by ScribeFire.

We always spoken about infrastructure sharing for last mile. The most important infrastructures that can be shared is backhaul infrastructure. BSNL and other operators should be encouraged by the government and the regulator to share the backhaul infrastructure like optical fibre cable, backhaul spectrum etc. Virtual Private Networks are a way of life for medium to large enterprises all over the world and should be propagated for use in villages. Of 6.5 lakh villages in India, the majority are in the interiors. These villages need connectivity for various institutions like primary schools, panchayats, primary health centres, and so on. Most often there are different schemes working in parallel to provide connectivity to each of these institutions. However, the easier solution is to merge all existing project into one project and resources supporting each of them can be shared. This will bring down cost as well as increase penetration.

Read the complete article in the Business Standard HERE

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.

Baffled VTI already lost four million dollars revenue and it will incur further 2.6 millions dollars to fix the underwater missing link. Vietnam’s Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Public Security, the Naval Command and military commands joined hands to catch the fishy fishermen.

Authorities have not discovered who initially cut the cable. But last Wednesday, police in the southern coastal town of Vung Tau said they captured a boat carrying 60 tons of undersea optical fibre cable, reported cellular-news.com quoting German news agency dpa.

Earlier the police also captured three boats and recovered 40 tons of similar cables. Same man, a Vung Tau resident, allegedly owns all the four boats.

But VTI’s deputy director Lan Quoc Cuong said the cable seized by police in Vung Tau does not match the cable his company owns, and they must have come from a different severed line.

He said finding the cable would have been difficult for the thieves. “The cable is located in different locations and at different depths,” he said. “Maybe, while using an anchor, they found the cable by accident and started cutting it.”

Meanwhile the Vietnamese media has made a disturbing revelation. The country’s defence ministry contracted few companies last August to salvage the decommissioned undersea copper cables. The US-backed former South Vietnamese government deployed them before the country became independent in 1975.

Reports said some of these companies apparently went for legitimate undersea treasures hunt but they may have struck the operational undersea fibre optic cables instead.

Whatever the case may be, robbing the submarine cable is getting rampant in Vietnam, said VietNamNet Bridge. So far this year, five undersea optical cable theft cases have been detected.

The latest case was on May 3 when border guards of the southern province of Kien Giang detected two fishing boats carrying 80 tonnes of cable. A boat owner said that while catching fish offshore, his boat caught the cable and they cut the cable and brought it to the mainland to sell.

Earlier on April 15, three fishing boats loaded with 80 tonnes of cable were caught in the southern province of Soc Trang. Fishermen on those boats said that they found the cable offshore and stopped catching fish to cut the cable to sell as waste.

Authorities of Kien Giang, Bac Lieu, Soc Trang provinces have seized hundreds of tonnes of telecom cable from fishing boats. Police say they have broken up five rings selling some 500 tons of illegally salvaged cable since the beginning of this year, cellular-news.com said.

:: bdnews24.com ::

Dhaka, Nov 13 (bdnews24.com) – A suspected act of sabotage derailed telecommunications transmission optical fibre cable links between Dhaka and Chittagong Monday night.Submarine cable subscribers in Dhaka got disconnected at 7:30pm.

Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board rushed a maintenance team to the spot on the outskirts of Comilla town but failed to put the connection back on.

A senior official told bdnews24.com that the BTTB suspected the cable cut was an “act of sabotage”.

”There is no maintenance work of the Roads and Highways Division in the area which is generally the primary cause of such cable cuts,” he said in support of his argument.

”We cannot repair the cable in the night as we don’t have enough workers.”

BTTB has approximately 17,000 employees.

Streaming Fast      
28 September 2006 19:00:19
Sri Lanka Telecom links up with India’s BSNL to offer wider choice
 
September 28 2006 (LBO) – India’s Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited Thursday officially kicked off a 1.8 billion rupee undersea cable unit with Sri Lanka Telecom, which will bring down call rates between South Asian countries.
The optical fibre cable, which run between Mt Lavinia (Sri Lanka) and Tuticorin in India, will enable SLT customers to enjoy high speed broadband services such as audio and video streaming.

 Read full article on LBO

The government violated the law by allowing the state-run telecoms monopoly to own and operate the country’s only submarine cable network. Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) built the SEA-ME-WE4 submarine cable and its associated infrastructure from the earnings of its other telecoms ventures and the law explicitly prohibits such practices of subsidisation.

Subsection C of Section 49 of the telecoms law says, “If an operator provides more than one service, but there exists competition in the market in providing one of such services and no competition in case of another service provided by him, then subsidy from the earnings of the service which is subject to competition shall not be allowed for the other service which is not subject to competition.”

BTTB built the cable’s landing station in Cox’s Bazar and from there it deployed an optical fibre link up to Chittagong from the earnings of its fixed telephony, Internet and data connectivity services. This is what the law explicitly prohibits because the private sector is also offering all these three categories of services through competition.

Therefore, the government cannot build the submarine cable from the earnings of the services ‘which are subject to competition’ and it must take away the submarine cable’s control from BTTB’s grip as soon as possible to comply with the legal provision and create a level playing field to foster the growth of telecoms and ICT sectors, sources said.

Otherwise, the government remains vulnerable to legal actions for such a gross non-compliance with the law, which might even temporarily stall the cable’s commercial operations causing a great deal of trouble for the undersea cable users of Bangladesh.

BTTB’s undisputed control over the SEA-ME-WE4 provides free bandwidth to its state-owned Internet service. It allows BTTB to maintain an artificially lower tariff for its Internet services while private Internet service providers (ISPs) have to buy the same bandwidth, which compels them to impose higher tariff on their services, putting them in disadvantage in competition with BTTB.