The New Nation - Internet Edition

ACCORDING to a recent newspaper report, four of the country's private landline telephone operators are set to invest about Taka 800 crore in the next one year in the central telecom zone regarded as 'the most commercially viable' among the five zones Bangladesh is divided into. 'Dhaka Telephone Company Limited', a private company obtained a licence from the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission the other day to provide fixed phone services in the zone along with two other companies. 'Ranks-Tel' and 'Square-Informatix' are the two other companies that received licences from the regulatory commission to run land phone operations in the central zone, puting an end to the monopoly of the state-owned Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB). The fourth operator, 'Telebarta Limited', will be awarded the licence once it pays the commission the licence fee, reportedly within few days as agreed upon.

The central zone, also known as the Dhaka Multi-Exchange Area, includes the capital city, Zinjira, Savar, Narayangonj, Gazipur and Tongi, and accounts for about 60 per cent of the total demand for telephones in the country. The zone is densely populated and the potential demand for fixed phones here may go up to at least 10 lakh in the coming years as predicted by the concerned sources reflected in the media report The actual demand is at least 10 times more as many prospective customers never apply for telephone connection because of the prolonged process of geting a connection from the telephone board, which has been the lone land phone operator in the country before the government deregulated the sector in 2004. The average waiting period for geting a landline connection in our country is more than one year, which has encouraged unbridled corruption in the sector as newspaper reports mentioned.

The land phone operators will have to face tough competition from the Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board and mobile phone operators to acquire new customers as most of the existing telephone users, both mobile and land phone, in the country are mainly concentrated in the capital city of Dhaka. The Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission has set a condition that each of the four private operators will have to acquire at least 10,000 clients in the central zone in the first year of its operations. The private land phone operators, on the other hand, were aware of the situation and would fight tooth and nail with the state-owned telephone board as well as the mobile operators with a quick rollout plan. The newly licensed operators, expected to launch their services in the capital within a couple of months, will offer competitive call charges and package-facilities to consolidate their position in the central zone market The regulatory commission had earlier issued 35 licences to 15 private operators for the country's north-east, south-east, north-west and south-west zones under the open licensing system. The central zone had been kept out of its licensing purview on a court order.