Over the years, price of bandwidth in Bangladesh has been reduced at a regular intervals to attract more and more users towards the internet cloud but yet the price of internet bandwidth is still high in compared other developing countries. This paper is designed to find an answer of the question what is the reason behind that and what should be done to reduce the cost of internet bandwidth.
In 2006 Bangladesh got connected to the SEA-ME-WE 4[1] Submarine cable. After that, many ISPs [Internet Service Provider] have found the opportunity to connect the internet via BTCL [Bangladesh Telecommunication Company Limited]. Since back then BTCL was the only service provider and thus enjoyed the monopoly role till 2008 when Mango Tele Service got their license as the first and only private IIG[2] [International Internet Gateway]. These two IIGs are connected to BSCCL[3] [Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company] and are providing bandwidth to all the ISP operator of Bangladesh. This is the time when number of internet users increased by quite a big margin as bandwidth quality and price became affordable to general individuals.
Figure 1 shows the total flow chart of the Total Internet System value Chain
The two most fundamental reason behind the cost is
- International Bandwidth
- Access Network
International Bandwidth:
In this portion we shall see that despite of a fixed cost charged by Tier 1 foreign ISP, this could be minimize to as low as 0 Cent. How is that possible? Answer is through Peering. Peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the customers of each network. The pure definition of peering is settlement-free or “sender keeps all,” meaning that neither party pays the other for the exchanged traffic; instead, each derives revenue from its own customers.
Let’s make it simpler, suppose in a large geographic area there are two networks established by two Tier 1 ISPs- cogent and global crossing that has set up a network of 100gbps line see Figure 2. Say facebook and yahoo has hosted in Network A and YouTube and Google has hosted in network B. On consumer demand, owners of Network A [Cogent] and Network B [Global Crossing] come to a mutual agreement to share their contents and this would be inter-exchangeable meaning neither party has to pay to the other.
Figure 2 Virtual Network where Network A and Network B has established their High speed connectivity
A statistics on Bangladeshi internet surfers has shown that most of the end user who uses internet other than mailing purpose use Google, FB, Yahoo and YouTube, resulting a traffic pattern of 90% downlink and 10% uplink as these sites are hosted outside the Bangladesh.
From the above circumstances it is audible that Bangladeshi ISPs cannot go for peering. Well had these ISPs had local contents to share then it would not cost them much of the money.
All the ISPs of Bangladesh should come under the same hood and propose it to the government to increase the local content. Because once they can convince these giants in Bangladesh then the traffic profile will no longer be same, they could go for peering and thus it could charge it’s subscriber with a nominal fee for surfing.
South Korea has shown the world and exemplary revolution in this sector. Korean broadband penetration and internet growth trends are the highlighted significantly. They have one of the highest broadband usage rates in among all developed countries. Question is how? Answer is simple, they have local version of all of these popular sites, they have Korean version of YouTube, Google and other famous sites. The same strategy needs to be adopted by Bangladesh as well in order to full fill the dream of digital Bangladesh.
Once this is done, and then the ISPs can go up to BSCCL for negotiating with its tier 1 supplier to bargain that, “See the uplink-downlink ratio is no longer the same. I am using less of your bandwidth these days, so lower your tariff”.
Since this is a long term plan local ISPs can go for temporary solutions.
Suppose, a user1 wants to mail user 2 and user 3 in the country and their mail server has been hosted locally then it does not need to go to THE Internet, rather they can do it internally and thus at a much cheaper rate.
Figure 3: Local Internet Connectivity
The ISP should create two routes for their subscriber, if the subscriber 1 wants to send mail to subscriber 2 then it will send traffic through the local route, if this is done, the proportion of 90-10 will further trimmed to at least 60-40 because a recent statistics has shown that still 70% of the subscriber uses internet for mailing purpose only. Thus they can save a lot of money by not using the international BW. ***
BDIX[4] an UNDP project was first established on 2004 to serve such purpose. It is an Inter connection exchange operator that connects ISPs in Bangladesh to keep local traffic locally.
I recently came to know about some ISPs who are providing their subscriber local movie database where user could download a movie at 3mbps speed with 128kbps line. How? Movie saved in a Local Server!!!!
Access Network
To understand the second reason we need to have a solid understanding of how Bangladesh is connected to the world. The story begins as follows:
When the SMW4 was established, they distributed the capacity measured in MIU-km to the owners as per their contribution. What is MIU KM? MIU-km stands for Minimum Investment Unit is a unit used with submarine cables. For example: 1 MIU KM for SEA-ME-WE4 cable system can be defined as the Length of 1 kilometer of an STM-1 link along this cable.
Suppose Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company (BSCCL) has received the permission of one million MIU-km into their bucket, BSCCL can sell this capacity anywhere within this SMW4 (It does not have to be only within the Bay of bangle, rather it can sell the capacity even at the Arab Sea)
Figure 4: SEA-ME-WE4 Connectivity
BSCCL has come up with a mu-km table integrating STM and Kilometer against cost. It is from this table the BSCCL calculates and offer a charge from one node to another.
Distance of Cox Bazaar to Chennai is 2191 km, now if a customer wants to connect with STM 1 then the total usage of capacity would be 2191*1=2191 ч-km.
If that customer wants a STM4 connectivity [Four times more bandwidth of one STM= 1.55.52 *4 MBPS] then ч-km would be 2191*4=8764 ч-km.
The charging is usually done on half circuit or full circuit basis. Half Circuit means from Cox’s Bazaar Landing Station to the imagery half line between Cox’s Bazaar & other landing stations. Full Circuit means the distance between Cox’s bazaar landing station and distant end Cable landing station.
Figure 5: Schematic diagram of how Dhaka is connected to SMW4
If a customer wants to connect from Cox Bazar to Tuas he will receive a quotation from different owners like TATA and BSCCL.
Let’s say the Cost of TATA and BSCCL from Cox Bazar to Tuas is $6000 and $12000 respectively. So a customer may take half circuit from BSCCL and half circuit from TATA which will cost 3+6=9 thousand. Now why would someone do that? One can easily go for TATA and save some money. Well if you are a Bangladeshi customer then you don’t have any other choice but to comply with that because if your company location is in Dhaka, then BSCCL has no other scheme to connect you from Dhaka to Cox bazaar. Landing station of BSCCL is located in Cox bazaar and submarine station is not open for Bangladesh. Not until I am writing this paper.
Due to this high price BSCCL is not being able to sell all of its capacity. Say out of one million miu-km, only 40% of them are sold by the grace of IGW [International Gateways], ICXs [Inter exchange operators], IPTSPs [Internet Protocol Telephony Service Provider], IIG[International Internet Gateway (IIG) operator] and ISPs [Internet Service Providers] and the rest of them are left over. As a result they have no other option but to sell at a cheaper rate in the international market through auctions where other members of SMW4 or may be owner from other network like SMW3 can participate and do the bidding. To my suggestion BSCCL should reduce the price and offer a more competitive rate so that it can attract not only Bangladeshi customers but also customer from overseas. Why selling in auction where you can do it locally?
If someone wants to get connected from Cox bazaar to equinox co-location centre[5] located in London, how would he do that? SMW4 ends in MARSEILLES (France), so he needs to contact another service provider who will take him from France to England and then from there to London. BSCCL can come up with such scheme where they would offer an attractive bundle offer the complete path assurance so that customer does not need to hop to different companies which still a bit of cumbersome.
Currently, BSCCL offer a scheme of 60% discount scheme to the IIG as per BTRC, at a price of 18000 tk per mbps and which is still high in compare to the international market bandwidth. BSCCL can reduce this further to as low as 6000 tk per mbps. BSCCL needs to understand the fact that technology is advancing rapidly, new modulation or multiplexing technique is coming up, if tomorrow a new modulation or multiplexing technique comes and is adapted by other smw4 authority then it will simply increase the capacity which means more capacity is going for auction. So if BSCCL can reduce the price it would be key factor in the ISP business. Because the ISP operator would be able to cut down their cost and thus charge lesser beat per second bps to it’s end user.
Final question would be why Facebook, You Tube, Google or Yahoo would be interested in Bangladesh? Well, Bangladesh has one of the fastest penetration rates in this data sector it has a huge potential market, they can earn millions of dollar simply by using advertisement [Example Google add sense] or perhaps YouTube may offer corporate solution in building video library for universities. In short they have a huge huge business prospect in this country.
Government has to take initiative in helping to grow the sector as well. By providing support in every manner, it could be through policy or ensuring security. When I mean security it involves both data security as well as connectivity security. Connectivity security is one of the vital issues. Ensuring submarine cable not being disturbed by some careless ocean going ships tearing the cable and thus making the country fully isolated from the world. To avoid such mishap careful precaution are to be taken by the concerned bodies. Strong regulation are also to be imposed for accessing restricted sites enriched with adult content and thus saving the young generations from moral degradation.
[1] The South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) project is the fourth project in the SEA-ME-WE series. On 27th March 2004, a consortium of 16 international telecommunications companies signed construction and maintenance agreements for the new optical fiber submarine cable system linking South East Asia to Europe via the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East and the estimated project cost is of the order of US$ 500 million. The total length of the SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable system will span approximately 20,000 km.
[2] IIGs will serve as a gateway for routing International incoming and outgoing Internet based data traffic. All ISPs shall be connected to global internet through these IIGs.
[3] Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company (BSCCL) is a Telecommunications infrastructure service provider primarily through the international Submarine Cable and domestic high capacity optical fiber network. Thus, the service provided by BSCCL represents the gateway communication between Bangladesh and the rest of the world.
[5] A colocation centre (also spelled collocation, colo, or coloc) or carrier hotel is a type of data centre where multiple customers locate network, server and storage gear and interconnect to a variety of telecommunications and other network service provider(s) with a minimum of cost and complexity.
Sami 