Prime Minister Khaleda Zia is scheduled to inaugurate the SEA-ME-WE-4 submarine cable's landing station at Zhilanga in the district tomorrow, sources at the local administration said yesterday.

An international consortium assigned Japanese Fujitsu and French Alcatel to install the half a billion dollar South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4 (SEA-ME-WE-4) submarine cable line, spanning about 20,000 km across the eastern and western hemispheres.

Fujitsu and Alcatel last month completed installing all necessary equipment at the landing station in Old T&T area of Zhilanga.

However, the country will have to wait another month to get access to the superhighway due to a delay in laying an optical fibre cable link between Cox's Bazar and Chittagong. Although the Turkish contractor Hesfibel was supposed to finish installing the 160km cable link by last November, it is expected to complete the task in next month.

From the SEA-ME-WE-4 telecom network providing an ultra-fast terabyte-per-second connectivity, Bangladesh will subscribe a 10gigabyte bandwidth, enough to meet the country's internet and telephony demands for the next 10 years. Presently it uses about 150megabyte bandwidth.

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

The Cox's Bazar landing station construction work worth Tk 15 million started in April 2005. Besides the station, there are an administrative and two residential buildings, and a dormitory inside the compound.

AFP reports: "The connection with the submarine cable system will immediately connect our telecom backbone with the high-speed global telecom system known as the information superhighway," Abdul Malek Akhand, chairman of the state-run Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) told the news agency.

The link will give Bangladesh better voice and data transmission bandwidth enabling the country to offer outsourcing services such as call centres, data processing and medical transcriptions for the first time, he added.

Bangladesh turned down an earlier opportunity in the late 1980s and analysts say the decision has hampered the growth of telecom and outsourcing services. The country has only a small number of call centres.

"It's a very good news for us. The submarine cable will increase our bandwidth many times more than the present rate and it will lead to a big fall in internet charges," said Ershad Shafi Chowdhury, general secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association.

"But it's not the end of the story. The telephone board has yet to upgrade the domestic cable system and other infrastructure, making it almost impossible to reap the benefit immediately," he added.