Preparing for formal opening of the submarine cable late this month, BTRC, the telecom regulator, is also at the final stage of framing a submarine cable usage policy. The proposed policy has included a provision requiring subscribers to take a special licence for access to the information superhighway, said sources.

The ISPs currently pay Tk 4 lakh for the licence to provide Internet service nationwide and Tk 3 lakh to operate in the capital.

Once the usage policy takes effect, the procedure for bandwidth allocation will get costlier and even more complicated, argue the access providers who are supposed to be the primary subscribers to the submarine cable service.

"There is every move to make things complicated and increase the dependency on bureaucracy while little is the preparation for building capacity necessary to ensure maximum utilisation of the huge bandwidth," Akhtaruzzaman Manju, president of the Internet Service Providers Association of Bangladesh, told The Daily Star.

The country was hooked up to the 20,000-km SEA-ME-WE-4 (South-East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4) submarine telecommunications cable in October last year.

But it has yet to start making use of the huge bandwidth to be carried through optical fibre thanks to BTTB's failure to complete the installation of 156-kilometre fibre-optic link between the cable landing station in Cox's Bazar and Chittagong.

Except for Bangladesh, all members of the 16-party international consortium are already earning a substantial amount of revenue from the cable.

ISPs demand that the government form a committee with representatives from different stakeholders for managing the submarine cable project for the sake of transparency.

"A major portion of the bandwidth might remain unsold for a long time, creating room for a shady market. So, it is necessary that a proper monitoring system is in place," said Sumon Ahmed Sabir who represents the ISP association in the committee working towards a broadband policy.

He said there is no logic behind the move to incorporate in the broadband policy the provision for a fresh licence for the ISPs.

ISPs allege that corruption has been rampant in different phases of the submarine cable project and two chairmen of the BTTB had been 'removed' in the face of corruption allegations.

The Prime Minister's Office recently blasted the BTTB for missing several deadlines including the latest in March for opening up the submarine cable. The state-run telecom service provider took flak also for its failure to finalise the usage policy.

The data transfer capacity of the cable system is 10 gigabyte a second, around 68 times higher than the country's existing capacity.

Telecoms experts said BTTB will need to increase the capacity of its International Transit Exchange (ITX) at Mohakhali and interconnection capacity of all other exchanges across the country with ITX to tap the vast bandwidth offered by the submarine cable.

Besides, an infrastructure to provide last-mile solution for the end users will have to be developed to increase the utilisation, they observed.

When contacted, a BTRC official said the policy is yet to be finalised and there is still scope to make changes.