The telephone board has decided not to invest in upgrading the capacity of the SEA-ME-WE-4 submarine cable system, discouraged by poor use of the present bandwidth capacity of the cable that connects Bangladesh with international telecoms system.

The state-owned Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board’s pursuit for connecting the country with a second submarine cable to ensure uninterrupted overseas voice and data communications and to back up its existing cable also deters the board to make further investment in increasing the capacity of the undersea cable.

The BTTB now gets 24.12 gigabytes per second bandwidth from the submarine cable which was originally 10Gbps when the country was connected with it in 2005. The bandwidth facility of the cable was available to the national network from May 2006.

BTTB officials said only 4.5Gbps capacity of the cable was in use amid poor development in the information and communications technology sector.

‘Eighty-four per cent of the cable’s capacity has remained unutilised,’ said a senior official of the board.

He said in consultation with the posts and telecommunications ministry last month, the telephone board decided not to invest in the cable. It would rather hook up with a second submarine cable, which would serve two purposes simultaneously — work as a back-up to the existing cable and ensure additional capacity to be required in the future.

‘Instead of investing more in the same cable, having a second submarine cable will serve our purpose the best,’ said the official.

The South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4 submarine cable system spans nearly 20,000km, linking 14 countries from France to Singapore through Italy, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand, and Malaysia. Its capacity will be doubled by the end of 2009 under a multi-million dollar project. The implementation of the project will result in increasing the trunk capacity of the cable and helping it support increasing broadband traffic along the route.

The cable system, owned by a consortium of 16 telecom carriers, including the BTTB, has awarded the upgradation contract to global infrastructure major Alcatel-Lucent and Japanese company Fujitsu at a cost to the tune of $500 million.

The cable system has a transmission capacity of 1.28 terabytes and was lighted up in 2005.