The New Nation - Internet Edition

BUSINESS REPORT

The two-day international workshop on WiMAX concluded in Dhaka on Tuesday with an announcement from Bangladesh's Telecom Regulatory Commission (BTRC) that it would award licence of the service by this year. The workshop on "WiMAX in Bangladesh: Present and Future" was attended by telecom vendors, government officials, phone company representatives and think tanks from home and abroad.

Experts from six vendor partners--Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Huawei, Intel, Motorola and Nokia Simens Networks-- presented a number of keynote papers to share their thoughts and predictions about WiMAX in several sessions in the workshop. WiMAX, the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, is a telecommunications technology, aimed at providing wireless data over long distances from point-to-point links to full mobile cellular type access. "WiMAX is a promising technology and our existing submarine cable has a huge bandwidth and we'll be able to utilize it properly," BTRC chairman Manzurul Alam said. "We are hopeful to provide license for the service by this year," he added. It is projected that if Wimax service starts in Bangladesh, it will draw about 10,000 users by the end of 2008 and over 200,000 by the end of 2010.