By Muhammad Zahidul Islam, The Daily Star
The government has approved a deal to sell a chunk of unused bandwidth to an Italian company at a price 65.6 times lower than the market rate. It was done without proper bidding or offering local players an option to buy it.
Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Ltd or BSCCL received a go-ahead to sell its 57 gigabits per second bandwidth to Telecom Italia Sparkels for Tk 9.77 crore, the total amount for 15 years, which is the life of the submarine cable.
It means a megabyte per second (Mbps) of bandwidth will cost a mere Tk 9.52 a month, compared to the lowest local price of Tk 625. If it were to sell the 57 gigabits per second bandwidth in the local market instead of Italia Sparkels, the price would amount to Tk 641.25 crore.
Experts and local players who deal with internet bandwidth said it is an outrageously low price, and it is not acceptable that BSCCL is charging much less for exporting bandwidth.
BSCCL will receive an additional 3 percent of the sale price a year for 15 years as maintenance charge, according to the approved document. This will total Tk 4.4 crore but for that, BSCCL will lose control over the cable.
“It may look like a loss, but huge capacity is still unused. Whatever we can earn through the deal will benefit us,” said Monowar Hossain, managing director of BSCCL, a state-owned company.
The approved price also meets international standards, according to Hossain.
