Officials said the information superhighway is not instantly available due to a delay in implementing an optical fibre cable link project between Cox's Bazar and Chittagong. The project is expected to be completed next month, although its Turkish contractor Hesfibel was supposed to finish the 160 km long installation by last November.

An international consortium has assigned Fujitsu and Alcatel to install the half a billion dollars South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe- 4 (SEA-ME-WE-4) submarine cable line.

The submarine system will span about 20,000 km across the eastern and western hemispheres providing an ultra fast terabit per second connectivity. Bangladesh will receive a 10 gigabyte bandwidth which is enough for the country's next 10 year's internet and telephony demands. Presently it uses about 150 megabyte bandwidth.

The engineers of Fujitsu and Alcatel last month finished installing all necessary equipment in a landing station at Old T&T area in Zhilanga, Cox's Bazar.

The submarine cable network starts from Malaysia and ends in France touching Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Italy and Algeria. A landing station in each of these countries have already been set up except in Pakistan, while India has set up two landing stations in Chennai and Mumbai, the officials said.

Construction work of the landing station facilities worth Tk 1.5 crore in Cox's Bazar started in last April. It has an administrative building, two residential buildings, and a dormitory.

Monwar Hussain, project director of the submarine cable scheme said, two large ships have been kept standby to supervise repairs and other installation works. There will also be some sub-centres in the 2000 kilometre area.