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BTRC to offer 4 tower company licences

Muhammad Zahidul Islam
The telecom regulator is on the final stage to offer four telecom tower company licences and a request for proposal (RFP) notice will be published within the next two to three working days.
In a special commission meeting yesterday, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission decided to issue the public notice without any delay, said Md Jahurul Haque, commissioner for legal and licensing division at the BTRC.
"We can award the licences within the next two months," said Haque.
These tower licensing provisions were incorporated to develop mobile network coverage area by facilitating optimum utilisation of telecom resources and reducing environmental hazards, he added.
According to guidelines, four
companies will get licences to manage mobile towers in Bangladesh and the evaluation process will be conducted under the "beauty contest” method.
Tower companies will have to own, build and maintain all telecom towers while operators, including all mobile and other telecom service providers, will take services from them.
Currently, mobile phone operators have more than 30,000 towers across the country, according to BTRC data; officials expea this number to go down after the licences are awarded.
A top official of the BTRC said though the option was there to provide four licences, only two interested parties have communicated with them so far.
Of them, one is US-based global tower company and a market leader, American Tower Corporation, and another is edotco Bangladesh, said
the official.
Malaysian company edotco is a sister concern of Axiata Croup, which is the owning company of local mobile operator Robi.
"The chances are low for other parties to join as it is a vety capital-intensive business," said a top official of the BTRC's legal and licensing wing.
In the guidelines, foreign companies' shareholding limit in a tower sharing company has been increased to 70 percent from the proposed 49 percent, meaning edotco will have to amend their shareholding structure before it can get the licence.
Moreover, no entity having relations with mobile phone or WiMAX companies can apply for the tower sharing business licence.
Hie licence acquisition fee and annual fee have been set at Tk 25 crore and Tk 5 crore respeaively.
Besides, licensees will have to
share 5.5 percent of their revenue with the government and contribute another 1 percent to the social obligation fund from the second year of getting licences.
The licensees will also have to give a performance bank guarantee worth Tk 20 crore to the BTRC and the telecom regulator would encash up to 50 percent of the performance bank guarantee in phases if the licensees fail to fulfill the rollout obligations.
As per the rollout obligations, the tower entity will have to start operations within 180 days of gating the licence.
On the other hand, mobile phone operators will have to roll back their towers within five years, but they can build towers in places where the tower sharing companies have no presence.
The tenure of the licence would be 15 years initially and would be extended gradually by five years.