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Telecom ministry moves to tackle illegal calls

Ministry cuts international call rates by 50pc, awaits final approval from finance ministry

Abdullah Mamun
The telecom ministry has slashed the international incoming call rate by 50 percent to $0,015 a minute, to discourage illegal call trafficking, on a test basis for the next six months.
Currently, some service providers carry international calls through grey channels using voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology.
Abubakar Siddique, telecom secretary, said the decision was sent to the finance ministry on Wednesday for consent, as it may hurt the government revenue, which is Tk 1,100 crore a year. The approval may take up to four weeks.
The government currently gets 51.75 percent revenue from incoming international calls, but it will get 40 percent with the declaration of the new regime, Siddique said.
The rest will be distributed to the international gateway (IGW), telecom operators and interconnection exchanges (ICX).
IGWs transport international calls while ICXs connect different telecom service providers. If any call comes to the country bypassing the IGW- ICX route, it becomes illegal and the government does not get any revenue.
The telecom operators have accepted the matter positively, while some IGWs have said that it will not change the current scenario.
Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) proposed to reduce the call rates a couple of months ago, Siddique said.
The numbers of both legal and illegal international call volumes are almost the same, according to market insiders. In January, the country received more than 4.5 crore minute calls on average from other countries a day, according to BTRCdata.
On January 30, the Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh wrote a letter to the telecom ministry to reduce the rate from 3 cents to 1.5 cents as most illegal VoIP calls are between 1.5 and 2 cents, said TIM Nurul Kabir, the association's secretary general.
Mir Nasir Hossain, managing director of Mir Telecom, said it has become tough to make profits as many new IGW operators are in operation.
The situation will be more challenging when the call rate will be reduced, he added.
The government should think twice before taking the decision as illegal calls can be reduced through regulation, said Zahir Ahmed, chief executive of BanglaTel.