VoIP licences from April

Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission will start issuing licences for handling international calls through VoIP from April.

Voice over Internet Protocol is a set of facilities for managing the delivery of voice information using the internet. The licence policy has almost been finalised and BTRC is now giving it a final scrutiny.

BTRC chairman Maj Gen (retd) Zia Ahmed told bdnews24.com on Tuesday that the posts and telecommunications ministry recently sent the draft policy to the telecom regulator.

“Applications for licence will be invited after finalising the policy within two to two-and-a-half months,” he added.

The decision on issuing VoIP licences was reached at after the prime minister held a meeting on reviewing telecommunications fees and charges on August 9 last year.
The government formed a new committee on December 1 last year to investigate illegal VoIP call terminations, which it suspects is the reason behind a huge drop in international incoming call revenues of the state-owned landline company BTCL.

The six-member committee, with BTRC commissioner A T M Monirul Alam as its convenor, has been investigating whether any international gateway, interconnection exchange or international internet gateway is linked with unlicenced VoIP call terminations and if so, what to do to combat the practice.

The committee is scheduled to submit its report at the end of this month.

The draft policy sets the licence application fee at Tk 5,000 while the fee for licence authorisation is Tk 500,000 with a bank guarantee of Tk 250,000.

Successful operators will have to return 20 per cent of their earnings to the government while Tk 10,000 is required to renew the licence every year.

The draft policy also forbids the operators from making more than 90 calls at the same time.

According to the BTRC statistics, nearly 40 million minutes of international calls are made legally to and from Bangladesh per day while 10 million-minute calls are terminated illegally on an average.

The government loses Tk 50 million in revenue every day due to illegal VoIP, according to BRTC.