Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) is planning to lease about 100 gigabytes of international bandwidth from Bangladesh, say news reports. This will be deployed to route the majority of the country?s overseas call and data traffic through a new gateway in Agartala.
The move is aimed at reducing BSNL?s dependence on Tata Communications? Chennai landing station for routing international voice and data traffic from India?s eastern, northeastern and southern states. The Department of Telecommunications has mandated BSNL to ink multi-year international internet bandwidth leasing pacts with Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited and Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Limited to establish optical fibre cable connectivity between India and Bangladesh.
The link will connect the Agartala international gateway with Dhaka and the Cox?s Bazaar cable landing station in Bangladesh for accessing global bandwidth.
Bangladesh co-owns the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) submarine cable system which runs from Singapore to France and connects Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates , Tunisia and Algeria. It is the primary internet backbone between South East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe.
