A submarine cable snaps in every three days while a terrestrial cable gets severed in every 30 minutes somewhere in the world. The global economy counts annual loss of US$26.5 billion due to such disruptions, estimates Ciena. Therefore, route-diversity is the fundamental prerequisite of uninterrupted Internet. Early last year we reported the activation of cross-border terrestrial links between Bangladesh and India.
Bangladesh is connected with the world through only one submarine cable system (SEA-ME-WE4). Nearly four months back, Douglas Madory of Renesys Corporation has analyzed the significance of terrestrial cables for the backup of Internet. He wrote: The Internet of Bangladesh has been connected to the world by a single submarine cable, Sea-Me-We 4 (SMW4), since this 18,800 kilometer-long optical-fiber system made its landing at Cox’s Bazar in 2006. However, in the nearly seven years since SMW4’s activation, national Internet outages have plagued Bangladesh with some regularity. When their portion of this system is sabotaged, suffers a failure or is down for maintenance, virtually all Internet bandwidth for the 7th most populous country in the world disappears, forcing local providers to fall back to slow and expensive satellite services or to simply wait for restoration.
It’s certainly worth sharing and I am to be blamed for belated posting. Douglas Madory is the Senior Research Engineer at Renesys Corporation, which is globally respected as the “Internet Intelligence Authority.” Doug closely watches how the Internet functions worldwide. Two months back he published the imperatives of terrestrial backup for the only submarine cable of Bangladesh. In the concluding paragraph titled, “Greater Terrestrial Connectivity in Asia” he wrote: Abu Saeed Khan, the Senior Policy Fellow of LIRNEasia, helped persuade the government of Bangladesh to join the SMW4 consortium in 2002 and has been working ever since to increase Internet inter-connectivity all across South and Southeast Asia.