_{Well my home country is planning to get into new ride of technology. I was pleased to hear that.}

Bangladesh has launched its first submarine fiber-optic cable, allowing high-speed telecommunications that are likely to enhance the country's information technology sector.

"Today, we begin a new journey as Bangladesh enters the information superhighway," Prime Minister Khaleda Zia said Sunday in the coastal town of Cox's Bazar, about 185 miles south of Dhaka, the national capital.

The cable network — covering some 786 miles across the country from the Bay of Bengal — will provide a fiber-optic link with a data-transfer capacity of 10 gigabits per second, compared to the 150 megabit per second bandwidth now used by the state-owned Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board and dozens of private Internet service providers.

The $95.75 million submarine cable is expected to greatly improve Internet and digital telephone connections and make data transfers faster and cheaper. It is also likely to boost lucrative Internet-enabled services like call centers, data processing, e-commerce, telemedicine and distance learning, industry experts said.

The submarine cable is part of a multimillion-dollar) international project being implemented by a 13-nation consortium called South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe-4.

The project extends from Singapore to France with more than 12,430 miles of undersea fiber-optic cables passing through Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and several Middle Eastern countries

Source CANOE.CA