Bangladesh embarks onto the global information superhighway tomorrow (Sunday) as Prime Minister Khaleda Zia is scheduled to inaugurate the submarine cable at its landing station at Cox’s Bazar coast on the day.

The commissioning of the new systems sets a landmark in the country’s telecommunications and information communication technology sector as it will tremendously enhance the performance and capacity in this field, said officials of the Telecommunications Ministry.

They viewed that the capacity of telecommunications and data transfer would be greatly enhanced from the present level, giving a high-speed, low-priced Internet and telecommunications gateway to the users to catch up with the fast-moving world.

Bangladesh earlier signed an agreement with 12 other countries under a consortium in 2004 to implement a mega-project at a cost of Tk 628 crore for installing the submarine cable down the seabed.

The consortium called South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe-4 was formed to implement the project for connecting the country with undersea optical fibre passing from Singapore through Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and a number of Middle-Eastern countries to finally land in France. Now the county will have a 10-gigabyte data-transfer capacity a second, 68 times higher than the current speed, the official said about the benefits the nation is going to reap-though a bit late. Earlier, Bangladesh had missed the bus to get onto the information superhighway by not joining the group when the submarine cable passed through the Bay of Bengal.

The capacity is considered adequate for the next 10 years and the submarine cable has a life of 15 years.

The state-owned Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) and over 100 Internet service providers (ISP) now have a 150-megabyte data-transfer capacity per second, the officials claimed. Also, the submarine cable link is going to provide the infrastructure for large-scale software export and scope for investment in the knowledge economy.

IT-enabled value-added services like call centre, tele-medicine, and distance education at overseas universities are among the sectors of the high-tech productive activities. Under the Submarine Cable Project, the government is implementing a number of schemes. Those include construction of cable-landing station, a 22,000-kilometre trunk route and 1,200-1,400-km branch route of submarine cable, installation of optical fibre link between Chittagong and Cox’sbazar along the highway, upgrading the existing Chittagong-Dhaka optical fibre link, installation of optical link between Chittagong and Cox’sbazar over electrical grid line and other installations.