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.

Gateway licensing plan raises eyebrows

80 new players will overcrowd the sector: analysts

Telecom analysts have opposed a government decision to roll out 80 new gateway licences and said an overcrowded sector will encourage companies to earn money through illegal ways.

And excessive competition created by too may players in the small market will cut into business, they said.

The telecom ministry approved a plan for 80 gateway licences, despite opposition from Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC).

The government will issue 24 licences for international gateways (IGW), 20 interconnection exchanges (ICX) and 36 international internet gateways (IIG).

IGWs deal with overseas call transfers, while ICXs offer interconnectivity services to telecom operators. IIGs supply bandwidth to internet service providers.

Bangladesh's telecom market is too small for so many new players and they will not be able to make business, Zia Ahmed, chairman of BTRC, said on February 11.

Nine such licence holders already exist in the market.

All telecom operators will have to connect with the new licence holders, and that will become cumbersome, Ahmed added.

Moreover, around 4.5 crore international call minutes will be distributed a day among the IGWs, which will not be viable, he said.

The situation in the telecom sector will no longer be stable if the proposed number of licences is eventually issued, he said earlier.

Arshad Zaman Dipu, chairman of NovoTel, an IGW company, said the equilibrium would no longer exist in the sector.

For excess competition among the gateways, the big telecom operators will try to control the market, he said.

Around 45 million minutes of overseas calls on average are divided among four existing IGW operators a month, said Zahir Ahmed, chief executive officer of Mir Telecom. When 24 new licence holders will come into the market, the players will not be able to recover investment, he said.

After an investment of Tk 50 crore to Tk 60 crore on equipment and Tk 15 crore in licence fees, companies cannot make profit, he added.

To earn from the business, the companies may adopt illegal channels, analysts said. It is suspected that half of all the international calls come to the country through illegal ways. They also said it will be tough for government agencies to monitor the calls.

Sumon Ahmed Sabir, senior vice president of Internet Service Providers Association of Bangladesh (ISPAB), said at least Tk 500 crore will be needed to buy equipment from abroad for the new internet gateways.

Fifteen big internet service providers (ISP) currently purchase bandwidth from two companies, he said. But now the same ISPs will have to purchase bandwidth from 38 IIGs.

Bangladesh consumes 24 gigabytes of bandwidth, and so the IIGs will be able to sell 500 megabytes of bandwidth to the ISPs, which makes no sense, Sabir said.

Kazi Monirul Kabir, chief communication officer of Grameenphone, said efficient systems offer fewer middlemen. But according to the new decision, middlemen will be increased in the same layer with no justification, he said.

He added that the six mobile operators will have to be connected with the ICXs and IIGs for their interconnection, while they are already connected. It has become a 'technical nightmare' for the operators, he said.

Zahir Ahmed of Mir Telecom said some years ago, Pakistan issued 12 and Sri Lanka issued more than 30 IGWs, but finally, just a few of them exist in those countries. Bangladesh would face the same situation, he added.

Sabir of ISPAB said the new licences will result in a waste of foreign currency used to purchase equipment. According to the International Long Distance Telecommunications Service (ILDTS) policy of 2008, nine new entities who were not involved in the telecom business came to the market. The current government is doing the same again, he added.

This policy was formulated to stop illegal voice over internet protocol (VoIP), but that did not happened. The new initiative will worsen the sector, he said. 

On February 15, Rashed Amin Biddut, joint secretary general of ISPAB, said the decision by the government would encourage illegal ways.Telecom Minister Rajiuddin Ahmed Raju earlier said the ministry approved the issue of the new licenses to be transparent.We want to make a competitive market. Those who will do good will survive and the poor performers will phase out.BTRC requested the ministry to reconsider the number but the ministry denied. An analyst said that a decade ago, the government issued more than a dozen fixed telephony licenses without any market research. They invested around Tk 2,000 crore but could not become successful and involved in illegal VoIP. In 2010, BTRC cancelled 5 licences for the allegation of involvement in illegal VoIP.

BSNL to set up telecom connectivity through Bangladesh

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has planned to set up telecom connectivity throughBangladesh for North Eastern region of the country due to tough terrain and geographical isolation, top BSNLExecutive said today.

"Ministry has attached much importance in consolidating telecom network in NE region and we are interested in setting up an alternative route through Bangladesh due to tough terrain," Chairman and Managing Director of BSNL R K Upadhayaya told reporters here.

Over 700,000 Android devices are being activated every day, but that’s not exactly good news

Andy Rubin (pictured above, left), the father of Google’s mobile operating system, just posted this status update on his Google+ account: “There are now over 700,000 Android devices activated every day.”

At first glance it comes off as a hugely impressive number, that’s almost 5 million devices per week, but according to our estimates Android growth is slowing down. Back in May Google was saying they were activating over 400,000 devices per day. In June that number was raised to over 500,000 per day, but more importantly Andy Rubin, via Twitter, said that the activation rate was increasing at a rate of 4.4% week over week. Using Andy’s growth rate we calculated that by the end of October 2011 Android activations should be in the over 1,000,000 per day range. So what happened? It would be foolish to blame the iPhone, Windows Phone, or any other platform for this slow down. We think what we’re witnessing is the inability for smartphones to scale down to feature phone prices without sacrificing a significant amount of functionality.

There are sub $150 Android smartphones out on the market, but you don’t really want to be caught using one. Build quality is typically nonexistent, you can forget about having a responsive interface, and most applications in the Android market refuse to run on what’s usually a 320 x 240 pixel display. Earlier this year we had a conversation with Eldar Murtazin, the Editor in Chief of Mobile-Review, about the future of Android. He said that many folks are going to be let down by where Android is going to go in 2012, that Google is going to focus on enabling the creation of $100 smartphones. At the time we thought that Google aiming for the low end seemed a bit off, but now it makes an incredible amount of sense.

As Nokia likes to say, “the next billion” is where the market potential is.