Nepal Telecom’s 2,216 km fibre highway targets two provinces

What was agreed

The agreement is part of the Information Highway Project, which is building a national fibre backbone. This section covers 194 local levels in the two provinces. NepaliTelecom reports that it will also connect 432 mobile base station (BTS) sites, the towers that phones talk to.

Most of the cable will hang on poles. NepaliTelecom gives the split as 2,028 km of aerial fibre and 188 km underground. The project also includes 28 DWDM systems and five routers, and NepaliTelecom says it is meant to support future 5G expansion.

The contract allows three years. NepaliTelecom reports that the communications minister directed the authorities to finish it a year earlier than that. A deadline is a target until the cable is installed, tested and handed over.

The engineering behind it: many colours on one strand

An optical fibre carries data as pulses of light inside a glass strand thinner than a hair. On its own, one strand with one laser carries one channel. DWDM, dense wavelength division multiplexing, puts many lasers on the same strand, each at a slightly different colour of infrared light. A multiplexer at one end combines them and a demultiplexer at the other end splits them apart again, so one strand carries dozens of independent channels.

That is why DWDM matters for a rural backbone. Digging or stringing new cable across hills is the expensive part. Adding colours to cable already in place is far cheaper, so the same route can grow with demand for years. Routers then sit at the points where the backbone meets local networks, and decide which way each packet of data travels.

Aerial and buried cable each have costs. Aerial fibre on existing poles is faster and cheaper to install and easier to reach for repairs, but storms, falling trees, landslides and vehicles can bring it down. Buried fibre is protected from most of that but costs more to lay and is harder to repair when it is cut. A route mostly in the air, like this one, is quick to build and needs a good repair plan.

A backbone is also only as reliable as its weakest stretch. If a district is fed by one cable path, a single cut takes it offline. Engineers add a second path, a ring, so traffic can go round the other way. The reports do not say how much of this route will be built as rings.

What it means for Nepal

Better backbone capacity in the hills affects everyday things: video classes in a rural school, digital payments at a local shop, and mobile data quality at the 432 BTS sites the project names. It also matters in a disaster, when local governments and families depend on phone and data links staying up.

The useful way to follow the project is by numbers that can be checked: kilometres actually laid, local levels and BTS sites connected, and how often the links stay up after handover. A signed agreement is the start of that record, not the end.