Internet users milestone

Internet subscribers cross 5cr landmark

Amongst our country’s major flaws, trials and tribulations, the telecom industry passed a major milestone in July this year. From the BTRC website, it was informed that the country crossed over to 5.07 crore internet subscribers in July. In that month, fixed-line internet subscribers showed 12.93 lakh, mobile phone subscribers at 12.87 crore and Wimax users on a slow decline registering 1.74 lakh.

Grameenophone is the market leader in terms of internet communications, following Robi, Airtel and Teletalk, whereas oldest operator Citycell makes the bottom of the list.

This marks significant progress of the telecommunication sector of Bangladesh in 2015, where people are increasing tech-friendly and fanatics. Mostly now the growth is attributed to the availability of internet facilities in the common citizen’s palms through mobile phones, of the 5 crore, 97% are from phones.

A 41% price drop is registered in the 10 Gbps slab in Dhaka, Chittagong and Coxs Bazar, while it is a similar proportion drop for 1 Mbps bandwidth by the Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Ltd (BSCCL). However, of the IIG operators only 2 buy from BSCCL and the rest of the 35 from International Terrestrial Cable (ITC) operators. Also, the leader Grameenphone claimed only a small fraction of the bandwidth cost is reflected in consumer prices. Therefore, the end users will not be benefited from this price reduction, which should be the ultimate aim of the price policies, which was termed by the ISP Association Bangladesh (ISPAB) as an "eyewash by the BSCCL"

Read more: 
End users of internet will not gain from bandwidth price cut, say operators