About 10,000 customers of the state-owned Teletalk now cannot make calls to or receive calls from subscribers of the four private cellular operators.

The private operators have over five million subscribers across the country.

Teletalk has no interconnectivity agreement with them, private operators said. They allowed Teletalk access to their network for about a month, hoping it would come forward to make such deals.

Teletalk started commercial operation on March 31.

"We showed courtesy for about a month but they (Teletalk) did not reciprocate. They launched service without any interconnectivity agreement with us and continued it," a senior official of the Association of Telecom Operators Bangladesh (ATOB) said.

For testing their network, Teletalk took one E-1 connectivity from the private operators -- GrameenPhone, Telecom Malaysia International Bangladesh (TMIB), Pacific Bangladesh Telecom Limited (PBTL) and Sheba Telecom, service provider of Banglalink.

Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the ATOB for temporary use of interconnectivity, which expired on March 25.

ATOB officials said they have not snapped interconnection with Teletalk but its subscribers are facing problems due to over exploitation of capacity.

" No-one from Teletalk contacted us so far. Rather, we signed a MoU with the BTTB. So, we first need to know the status of the company for further cooperation," another ATOB official said.

Meanwhile, Teletalk has suspended its subscription drive because of lack of its capacity to handle the huge rush for its service, and for technical problems.