Telcos seek business- friendly climate to provide better services

The quality of telecom services cannot be improved alone by developing digital infrastructure; it requires the existing ecosystem to be in synch, observed the Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh.

The observation came at a webinar the platform of mobile operators hosted on Thursday with the journalists.

They said the investment in mobile services sector had been steadily declining in the country over the past five years due to an unfavourable business environment.

The operators picked up a number of intricacies standing up to better services that include lack of proper business ecosystem, rational tax policy, unified licences, law and policy reformation and spectrum allocation with sensible pricing.

High expenses and low profit keep investors away from investing in the telecom sector, which contributes more than 7 per cent to GDP and have a potential of 10 per cent by 2022, they opined.

There are more than 35000 towers, over 37000 2G sites, 34000 3G sites and 25000 4G sites. Bangladesh has 176.41 million subscribers, of which 120.95 million are internet users.

“Our highly regulated mobile network requires third party operators to regulate optical fiber lines and towers. This is shooting up our service-providing cost,” said Secretary General Brig-Gen SM Farhad (Retd) of the association.

Drawing a reference to the neighboring companies in India, Shahed Alam, chief corporate affairs officer of Robi, said they have unified licences from optical fiber to tower sites that gave them the upper hand to provide relatively services at cheaper rate.

“It will be better if the government allows operators to use their relaxed spectrum and tower sites with another operator,” said Hossain Sadat, chief corporate affairs officer (Acting) of Grameenphone.

“This will benefit both parties as the affording party would be able to give better services alongside increasing revenue for the selling company.”

From 1997 through 2019, the telecom industry invested more than Tk 135,000 crore and paid over Tk 140,000 crore to the government exchequer.