Bangla telecom operators to invest Tk 8,000-mn in one year

Dhaka: Four of the country’s private landline telephone operators are set to invest about Tk 800 crore in the next one year in the central telecom zone regarded as the most commercially viable among the five zones the country is divided into.

‘Given the huge demand for landline phones in the central zone, we believe it will attract an investment to the tune of Tk 800 crore in the next one year for building infrastructure,’ said ATM Hayatuzzaman, chairman of Dhaka Telephone Company Limited which obtained a licence from the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission on Sunday to provide fixed phone services in the zone along with two other companies.

RanksTel and Square Informatix are the two other companies that received licences on the day from the regulatory commission to run land phone operations in the central zone, putting an end to the monopoly of the state-owned Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board. The fourth operator, Telebarta Limited, will be awarded the licence once it pays the commission the licence fee, reportedly within a few days.

The central zone, also known as the Dhaka Multi-Exchange Area, includes the capital, Zinjira, Savar, Narayanganj, 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, industry insiders said.

According to them, the actual demand is at least 10 times more as many prospective customers never apply for telephone connection because of the prolonged process of getting a connection from the telephone board, which had been the lone land phone operator in the country before the government deregulated the sector in 2004.

The average waiting period for getting a landline connection is more than one year, which has encouraged unbridled corruption in the sector, the industry sources said. The fixed phone operators will have to face tough competition from the BTTB 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 Dhaka.

The BTRC 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.
Hayatuzzaman said the private land phone operators were aware of the situation and would fight tooth and nail with the BTTB as well as the mobile phone operators with a quick rollout plan. The newly-licensed operators, expected to lunch their services in the capital within a couple of months, will offer competitive call charges and facilities to consolidate their position in the central zone market.

The new entrants to Dhaka will obviously eat up the BTTB’s market share as most of them are expected to provide telephone connection and set to customers at a rate much cheaper than that of the state-owned board, BTTB sources said. The BTRC earlier issued 35 licences to 15 private-sector PSTN operators for the 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.