Call on GP's SMP status today
The telecom regulator will sit today to take a call on whether Grameenphone will be declared the Significant Market Power (SMP) operator, a move that can shake up the country's mobile telephony landscape.
The SMP is a regulation that imposes restrictions on an operator once it corners 40 percent of the subscribers, revenues and spectrum.
As of December last year, Grameenphone has 46.33 percent share of the active customer base. For the last few years, the operator's revenue share has been more than 50 percent.
Within the next couple of weeks Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission will decide what restrictions will be placed on the SMP operator, a top official of the regulator told The Daily Star yesterday.
The BTRC in its regular commission meeting yesterday discussed the matter and found only Grameenphone as the operator with more than 40 percent revenue and customer market share, said its acting chairman Md Jahurul Haque.
“It is a very vast issue. We have discussed the matter for hours and we will sit again tomorrow (today) and take a final decision.”
It will take hardly two weeks to go into implementation after taking the decision, said Haque, also the commissioner of BTRC's legal and licensing department. The government passed the SMP regulation, which has been in the works since 2011, in November last year and later the BTRC formed a committee to devise a process to implement it.
BTRC officials said the committee recommended increasing the SMP operator's tariffs for both voice calls and data and imposing different quality control parameters for it.
“We want to ensure a healthy competition in the market and for that the SMP regulation will be one of our enablers,” Haque said.
The new regulation -- which is already available in India, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia -- states if an operator is found to wage anti-market activities the BTRC can step in to break the monopoly or oligopoly through it.
Any competitor can also lodge complaint against the SMP and the regulator will have a look into it.
The restrictions are expected to give a leg-up to Robi and Banglalink and to a certain extent to Teletalk.
Robi now has 29.87 percent market share, Banglalink 21.35 percent and Teletalk 2.46 percent.
SMP TO BAR INVESTMENT: GP
In a discussion yesterday at a city restaurant the operator said the regulation will hinder innovation, efficiency and ultimately deter foreign direct investment.
“This is a penalty to a company that is efficient in its operations and the customers will ultimately pay for it,” said Hossain Sadat, head of regulatory affairs of Grameenphone.
If customers get different prices from different operators it will tilt the level-playing field that is present now, he said. “We are not against the SMP regulation and here we request the government to follow the global best practices,” he added.
A senior executive of Grameenphone hinted that if the operator finds the regulation going against competition, it may initiate a legal battle.
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