News Title : Exclusive mobile tower cos vital for better telecom service

News Date : 2015-11-08

-Ahmed Shawki
Individual tower management companies with basic focus on mobile tower building can play a great role to improve service quality of telecom service in Bangladesh and reach it in the deep rural areas, said the edotco Group chief marketing officer, Wan Zainal Adileen, in an exclusive interview with New Age recently. Established in 2012, edotco is a wholly owned telecommunication infrastructure services subsidiary of Axiata with independence in its management and operations. Edotco provides end-to-end solutions in the tower services sector including co-locations, build-to-suit, energy, transmission and operations and maintenance in the regions of South Asia and South-East Asia. ‘Bangladesh is our biggest market with around 7,000 towers where we have a 15,000 tower portfolio. The opportunity here is enormous as there is a vibrant telecom industry which is growing every day. I believe in order to achieve the next level of maturity for the industry, the country’s telecom operators should outsource their tower and tower operations to independent companies like edotco’ said Zainal. Pointing out the benefit of the mobile users, he said, ‘If the mobile phone operators are freed from tower management, which is a great amount of work, then they are left with more room to focus on their service and products innovation for the users. At the same time, as the towers will be managed by a specialised company, the operators can achieve higher level of cost optimisation and operational efficiency.’ ‘Moreover, sometimes it is not business viable for the mobile operators to build and manage tower in rural areas where the customer base is very low. A tower company like us can play a role. We can go to such places to build and promote the mobile companies to share and co-locate their equipment on our towers,’ he said. Zainal also mentioned the current phase of 3G rollout was helpful for edotco. ‘We are looking forward to the 4G. There will be another rollout for the 4G where we believe can be able to be a part of. Our client list in Bangladesh includes some big names in the market as we have ensured that quality in the industry.’ When asked that draft tower company guidelines does not allow any tower company’s affiliation with any mobile operators whereas edotco is partially owned by local operator Robi, Zainal said, ‘Edotco has the intention to go for 100 per cent ownership in the country to achieve our aspiration to be a fully independent tower company in Bangladesh. I would not want to comment further on the guidelines as they are currently in the good hands of the regulators, but as per our commitment, we will do whatever is required to comply with the government regulation.

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