For some time we have been pointing to the fact that , the Bay of Bengal is one of the least connected by cable despite being home to six of the world’s 10 fastest growing economies.
Something is being done about it: a private company and the Bangladesh government’s undersea cable monopoly are entering into a joint venture to connect the landing point of SEA-ME-WE 4 in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and the capital of the Rakhine State in Myanmar. The private entity will own 90 percent of the cable, presumably because BSCCL could not come up with more money. It is a good thing, and meshes with the UN ESCAP vision of a Asia Pacific Information Superhighway (AP-IS) which is redundant and low cost.
The cable will be 250 kilometres long and will connect Cox’s Bazar and Myanmar’s coastal city of Sittwe, said Monwar Hossain, managing director of BSCCL.
“The cable will help the state-owned firm to export bandwidth to its neighbouring countries and also to countries like Indonesia and Cambodia,” he said.
“We can initially export around 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bandwidth through the link. We have been trying to enter the market in Myanmar for the last couple of years.”
It will take six months to lay the cable under the sea through Cox’s Bazar to Sittwe at a cost of $25 million, he said.
BSCCL will own 10 percent of the cable that will have a lifespan of around 20 years. It will be operated by a company named BSCCL-Blueberry Bangladesh Ltd.
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