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Allow VoIP to increase teledensity

WB study suggests

M ABDUR RAHIM
Bangladesh should allow Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to increase its teledensity, which is the lowest in the region, a World Bank report suggested.
The WB suggestion came in the backdrop of limited number of fixed lines and limited interconnection capacity between mobile phone and land phone in Bangladesh.
According to latest statistics, Bangladesh has 0.79 phones for per 100 people whereas it is 3.94 in India, 4.4 in Sri Lanka, 2.9 in Pakistan, 1.34 in Nepal, 24.98 in China, 49.9 in Malaysia and 6.17 in Indonesia.
More than 70 per cent of the population of Bangladesh do not have telephone access, the draft of Country Framework Report for Private Participation in Infrastructure for Bangladesh said.
It mentioned that Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) has the monopoly in fixed
phone with over six lakh connections while Bangladesh Rural Telecom Authority (BRTA) has 24,000 connections as of September 2002.
Four private mobile phone operators had over 10 lakh subscribers till the same period. But more than half of the total mobile phones do not have access to BTTB's fixed line network due to lack of physical interconnection capacity, the study said
The report was prepared by the World Bank and Public and Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility (PPIAF), a multi-donor technical assistance facility aimed at helping developing countries improve quality of their infrastructure through private participation.
The draft study said China has increased its teledensity at a phenomenal rate by using Internetbased technologies like VoIP and IP telephony. As the technology can offer service at cheap rate it can help people get access to telecommunication.
Although BTTB has been generating revenue surplus for the past ten years, it can not reinvest the revenue for its expansion as a significant proportion of the surplus has been transferred to the consolidated revenue fund, it noted.
Had BTTB been able to use its revenue surplus for expanding network capacity, teledensity would have been higher, the report said.
Currently all private telecom service providers face constraints in further expanding their services mainly due to BTTB's unwillingness to provide necessary interconnection facilities resulting from inadequacy in its network, it observed.
In order to partially resolve interconnection capacity problem, the four cellular operators recently agreed to fund transit switching equipment in BTTB's network which would cost around $ 2 million, it noted.
The another problem of BTTB is
its high connection charge. The connection cost is $171 in Bangladesh, $18 in India, $83 in Pakistan, $175 in Sri Lanka, $28 in Nepal, $13 in Malaysia and $35 in Indonesia.
The study recommended restructuring of BTTB to make it a public limited company and then eventual privatisation of the state-owned body with a view to increase teledensity and improve service standard with efficiency of private sector participation.
Since BTTB has failed to meet pent-up demand for basic telecommunication services, the market should be opened to competition as it is seen that competition is the key to a successful telecom revolution, the study observed.
The study also recommended ending of the monopoly of BTTB in land phone and international call service by opening the market to private sector. It also called for reviewing tariff structure of BTTB.