Amid subscribers claiming the new unified call rate has hiked their cost, mobile operators say it’s too early to say whether it has hiked or cut cost of talk time.
According to them, it will take at least three months to understand the scenario and another six months for the subscribers to get clear view adding that the benefit will be clear once mobile number portability is introduced.
“Mobile users will no longer need to hesitate to call another operator and can talk to any operator at a same rate,” Head of Corporate Regulatory Affairs at Robi Shahed Alam told Bangla Tribune.
“The revised call rate will increase competition in the market and will lower the users’ cost by 3 percent to 5 percent,” he added.
At present, a subscriber can make a call to more than 150 million numbers at a unified rate, which was not possible before,” a telecom top executive Taimur Rahman told Bangla Tribune.
Rahman, who is the chief of Corporate Regulatory Affairs at Banglalink, said the impact of the revised rate will fully be understood after introducing the mobile number portability (MNP) service.
From the early hours of Aug 14, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) implemented the new tariff rate, which ranges from Tk 0.45 to Tk 2 per minute, scrapping the previous on-net and off-net floor prices of Tk 0.25 and Tk 0.60 respectively.
Operators Grameenphone, Robi, Banglalink, and Teletalk used to charge customers a minimum Tk 0.25 per minute for on-net calls, while for off-net calls, customers were charged a minimum Tk 0.60 per minute. Following the introduction of the new rate, the minimum rates for on-net and off-net calls has been set at Tk 0.45.
In its directive, BTRC also barred mobile operators from offering separate tariffs for on-net and off-net phone calls.
Under BTRC’s new directive, the interconnecting charge for one operator to another operator is Tk 0.14 per minute, including Tk 0.04 for the Interconnection Exchange (ICX) operator and Tk 0.10 for the terminating operator.
The rest of the call tariff, whether Tk 0.45 or Tk 2, is kept by the originating operator.
Apart from mobile phone operators, the new rate is also applicable for Internet Protocol Telephony Service Provider (IPTSP), public switched telephone network (PSTN), and ICX operators.
All regular and promotional packages, offers, and bundles which would contradict the new directive, have become invalid automatically.
According to BTRC, the country has 150.9 million active mobile phone connections as of June 2018, of which Grameenphone has 69.2 million, Robi 44.7 million, Banglalink 33.3 million and Teletalk 3.75 million.