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SUBMARINE CABLE

Tender delays may jeopardise schedule

STAR REPORT
The country risks falling behind schedule in its efforts to connect to the information superhighway, as the telecoms ministry is taking longer than expected in its tendering process for a submarine link between Cox's Bazar and Chittagong.
In the current tender, the BTTB has set the date for the submission of queries regarding tender documents on April 20.
The last date for selling bid documents has been set on May 7 and the tender closing date on May 8 at 11:00 a.m. Interested companies have to pay US$ 120,000 or Tk 75 lakh as a security bond.
The BTTB will allow five months for the supply, installation, testing and commission of a high capacity fiber optic cable and FDH transmission link between Chittagong and Cox's Bazar as well as the upgrading of the existing capacity between the Dhaka and Chittagong fiber optic link. However, it did not men-t i o n FROM PAGE 1
any date for the contract signing.
The installation must be completed by October of this year, when an international consortium is slated to finish the installation of the halfbillion US dollar South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe- 4 (SEA-ME-WE-4) submarine line, delivering the connection at Cox's Bazar pointBangladesh.
So far, however, no company has been chosen despite the looming May deadline for bids, because the tender process has hit several snags. The Cabinet Purchase Committee late last month rejected a proposal to award a contract to install an optical fibre link between Cox's Bazar and Chittagong due to alleged corruption and price manipulation. The committee meeting asked the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications to re-tender the work.
The committee also asked the authorities to punish officials concerned for advocating a contract that could have been concluded at a price Tk 17 crore lower than the one sought.
The BTTB wanted to award the contract to German company Siemensthe highest bidder in the project, which outlined a cost of 47 crore whereas Canadian bidder Nortel offered the lowest bid of Tk 30 crore.
The cabinet purchase committee meeting also noted that although the project's technical subcommittee announced the lowest bidder, Nortel, as "responsive", the
tender evaluation and re-evaluation committee pushed the highest bidder Siemens as "responsive". This was done even though one of the members in the evaluation committee repeatedly dissented.
BTTB Chairman Nurul Islam, however, expressed his optimism at a workshop last week to connect the country with the information superhighway "in due time."
The BTTB is optimistic about putting in place the missing optical fibre link in time, but observers of the sector have expressed deep scepticism.
Earlier, the BTTB took eight months just to complete the bidding procedure for the fibre optic link between Cox's Bazar and Chittagong, but this time it received only seven months to finish not only the bidding but the physical installation of the cable.
The submarine cable project itself has already been delayed by more than four years. Bangladesh finally signed an agreement with a consortium of 16 international telecom operators in March last year, after sitting on the project for four years.
The submarine system will span around 20,000 km across the eastern and western worlds to set an ultra fast terabit per second connectivity. Bangladesh will receive a 10 gigabyte bandwidthenough to supply the country's internet and telephony demands for the next 10 years. Presently it consumes about 150 megabytes of bandwidth.