Telecommunication transmission network demands massive thrust

A strong transmission network is vital for meeting Bangladesh's evolving digital demands, says Shahed Alam

Imagine that you don’t have control over the way your heart pumps blood through your veins. Instead, someone else has been given the right to decide how the blood is to flow, what speed it is to travel and what routes it is to follow. Do you think your body can function to its full potential? Of course not!

But we are expecting the mobile operators to do this same impossible task when we have barred them from laying their own fibre-optic cable - the veins of the telecom network - and instead made an external party, the National Telecommunication Transmission Network, or NTTN, responsible for facilitating the smooth flow of data in their networks back in 2009.

Afterwards, we were not only barred from laying fibre on our own, but the NTTN operators decided to stop leasing us the dark core fibre in the cable they laid, instead, offering us only bandwidth, which was not cost-effective for us in any way. In fact, without dark fibre, we can’t design a robust fibre backbone. As the last straw on the camel’s back, we were not even allowed to purchase DWDM, an equipment that can optimise the use of the available and leased fibre. Such self-defeating measures only serve the interest of the NTTN operators.

In case you are struggling to follow the tech part of the logic, let’s try to understand why the fibre network is so important for telecommunication. When we use the voice and/or data service, our mobile phones send and receive signals from nearby mobile towers using wireless technology. Then the towers instantaneously send those signals back to the mobile operator’s core network to facilitate the service experienced by the end-user. This part of the network infrastructure is termed the transmission network.

The transmission network is considered the backbone of the mobile network since it is responsible for carrying data between the base stations, switching centres and the core network. Without a robust transmission network made up of high-quality fibre optic cables, we will never be able to deliver the optimum level of quality of service. The reason is very simple - wireless connections can carry data over a limited distance only, but fibre optic cables can carry virtually unlimited data for tens of kilometres without distortions and the need for boosting the signals.

Consider the amount of fibre optic cable that has been rolled out in Bangladesh and its quality. According to the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, or BTRC’s June 2023 annual report, Bangladesh has 80,600 km of overhead (approximately) and 72,800 km of underground fibre optic cable. It’s worth noting that the overhead fibre optic cables do not meet the quality requirements for providing 4G service, let alone the upcoming 5G service. In other words, 53 percent of the country’s available fibre optic cables are unsuitable for providing quality data service in 4G technology.

So, in 15 years, the country has created an extremely weak transmission network with almost half of it unsuitable for the technological demands of the telecom sector. Contrast that with India, you will find that only in the nine months leading up to June 2023, they rolled out 913,950 km. In total, optical fibre rolled out as of June 2023 was a mammoth- 3,726,577 km in India.

Mobile operators in India had a huge role in this astounding level of fibre roll-out. We also see similar patterns in Malaysia and Sri Lanka. Whereas, in our own global benchmarking study, we have yet to find any country other than Bangladesh where the mobile operators are barred from laying their own fibre network.

The real irony is that while we have a severe deficit in fibre roll-out, the mobile operators don’t have access to all the available fibre in the country. Under the government-funded Info Sarkar project-3, more than 19,500 km of fibre (up to union level) was rolled out at a cost of Tk 21.41 billion. While the mobile operators struggle to get access to fibre network, this vast underutilised national resource remains out of reach for the operators since there is no modality in place to allow them access to this crucial infrastructure.

It is very clear from the empirical evidence illustrated earlier that our NTTN operators had invested in rolling out fibre optic cables from a short-term profit-centric objective. What we needed was a futuristic smart investment approach that readies the country to take the digital leap it deserves. Since that wasn’t to be, we are stuck with a rickety transmission network that is unfit for today’s telecommunication demands, let alone being able to facilitate the kind of digitisation the country so badly needs now.

What we need is to open up the transmission network market to the mobile operators along with anyone who has the credentials and the ability to invest and deliver what we need. The more competition we can create in this segment, the better served the nation and our customers will be, as it will help us to bring down the cost of data services for our customers and create a strong transmission network that can shoulder the aspirations of Bangladesh 2.0.

[Shahed Alam is a barrister and telecom expert]