News Title : BTRC close to appoint consultant for 4G launch by 2016

News Date : 2015-10-07

-Ishtiaq Husain
Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has finalised a short-list of consultants for spectrum roadmap and setting price as the government wants to introduce 4G mobile broadband service next year. A BTRC official said the regulator at a recent meeting finalised the list to appoint a full-time consultant. Earlier, the recruitment was a part-time. For the past few years, mobile phone operators have been demanding to formulate a spectrum roadmap outlining bands for different technologies and services along with their availability in future. Sources said the regulator short-listed five persons among the applicants taking experiences and qualifications into consideration. All the short-listed individuals are foreigners with one being Bangladeshi-British. They will have to face interview and after that one of them will be finally chosen. According to BTRC’s latest rules, duration of the consultant will be one year as said in the advertisement. The duties of the consultant will be preparing of band release plan for the country and advising necessary actions to prepare the band for releasing. The consultant will also fix acquisition fees and yearly charges for 4G spectrum bands. The salary will be negotiable while base price is fixed at $5,000. Recently, the regulatory body and the post and telecommunication division locked in conflict on spectrum pricing issues. Telecom industry insiders said these types of conflict would be resolved by appointing spectrum consultant. After the appointment, the government must make the spectrum available for mobile broadband in time and adopt a standard process and a clear and standard roadmap for spectrum allocation, said a high official of a mobile operator asking not to be named. A BTRC official said estimation of spectrum requirements for International Mobile Telecommunication (IMT) systems in Bangladesh is based on current and next 15 years traffic forecasting for voice, data and multimedia services. The BTRC in 2008 had formulated the first roadmap for telecom industry with 20 action plans. The BTRC in last few years conducted several auctions and drafted some policies under the first roadmap. The responsibility of the consultant will be making an estimation of actual spectrum requirements to ensure the quality of service. Determining acquisition fees and yearly charges of IMT spectrum bands will be based on the telecom market diffusion, traffic volume, revenue earnings of mobile operators, the country’s economic indicators and other pertinent factors. In 2013 the BTRC conducted the 3G spectrum auction where four private mobile phone companies took licence for 3G services. In the auction Grameenphone took 10MHz spectrum while Banglalink, Robi and Airtel took 5MHz spectrum each at the price of $21m a MHz.

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