House pushes Defense to change comm network in Afghanistan

The House Appropriations Committee asked the Defense Department to speed up development of a fiber-optic telecommunications network in Afghanistan and withheld $20 million from its fiscal 2010 budget as an incentive.

The House Appropriations Committee, in its report released on July 24 in conjunction with the fiscal 2010 Defense appropriations bill, said it would hold back the money from the Defense Information Systems Agency's budget until the agency submits a report on how it plans to replace the satellite-communications systems in Afghanistan with either fiber-optic or microwave circuits.

House members said they were "concerned about connecting the Afghanistan fiber-optic communications backbone to the global information network."

DISA should examine the feasibility of moving networks the Afghanistan government and Defense Department units use from "expensive, high-latency satellite links" to lower cost terrestrial and fiber networks. This would aid not only Defense operations in Afghanistan, but also would result in multiple social and economic benefits for Afghanistan, by providing an affordable national network.

DISA, in a request for information that closed on April 27, said it wanted to learn if commercial carriers could provide circuits that operate at speeds between 155 and 622 megabytes per second into and out of Afghanistan. The lower end data rate is more than 25 times the rate of the average 7 MBps home broadband connection in the Washington area.

Afghanistan let a contract in 2006 to ZTE Corp., a Chinese telecommunications firm, to build a 2,000 mile national fiber-optic network with 72 nodes that will connect major population centers, according to a January 2008 report the National Defense University released.

The House Appropriations Committee wants DISA to analyze alternatives to meet the needs of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which will increase from 23,000 to 40,000 this year. The analysis, the House report said, should include:

-- Leasing bandwidth from the Afghanistan Ministry of Communications using the country's existing fiber-optic backbone;

-- Leasing bandwidth from the commercial cellular operators, using their nationwide microwave backbones;

-- Leasing bandwidth from commercial satellite communications system providers; and

-- Providing incentives to the Afghanistan government to issue a new telecommunications license for a commercial fiber-optic system.

Bernie Skoch, a communications consultant with Suss Consulting, said it makes sense to move as much Defense traffic in Afghanistan to a fiber network, but he warned that not all major Defense installations could be served by such a network. Smaller and more remote installations might have to turn to a microwave network.