Nokia has been selected to supply submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE) for the Bangladesh Private Cable System (BPCS), a new privately owned subsea cable linking Bangladesh and Singapore. The 1,300-kilometre system will connect Cox’s Bazar to the Campana-owned UMO cable running between Myanmar and Singapore, significantly expanding international capacity for Bangladesh.
The BPCS cable, first announced in September 2024, will include three fibre pairs owned by the consortium, each capable of delivering at least 15 Tbps of bandwidth. Nokia’s SLTE technology will be deployed at both cable landing stations, enabling lower power consumption, reduced data centre space requirements, and improved network management, helping to reduce operational expenditure.
The consortium has already invested approximately BDT6 billion in the project and plans to commit an additional BDT12–13 billion to activate the three fibre pairs in the second half of 2026. Once operational, the cable will provide much-needed redundancy and resilience to Bangladesh’s international connectivity.
Currently, Bangladesh relies mainly on SEA-ME-WE 4 and SEA-ME-WE 5, both co-owned by state-run Bangladesh Submarine Cables PLC, which also holds a stake in the upcoming SEA-ME-WE 6 system expected to go live in early 2026. The importance of additional routes was underscored in April 2024, when a SEA-ME-WE 5 cable fault disrupted nearly two-thirds of the country’s international subsea capacity.
The BPCS consortium includes Summit Communications, CdNet Communications, and Metacore Subcom, all of which received licences from the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission in September 2022.
