Four firms get tower licences

Four joint ventures of local and foreign businesses were presented licences yesterday to manage the country's cellphone towers, ending mobile operators' ownership of those and paving the way for enhancement of the overall network service quality.

Once all the tower companies start running, mobile operators which are comparatively weak will be able to expand coverage with minimum investment, thus ensuring better service quality, said Telecom Minister Mustafa Jabbar.

“Afterwards the regulator will take tough action against mobile operators for poor quality of service,” he said while presenting the licences at Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission.

The four are edotco Bangladesh, Summit Tower Limited, Kirtonkhola Tower Bangladesh and AB Hightech Consortium.

All stated that they would need to buy towers from the mobile operators and build new ones across the country alongside investing a few thousand crore taka over the next couple of years to make the business viable.

Robi sold most of its towers to edotco Bangladesh, which is its sister company, a couple of years ago, while Banglalink is taking initiatives to sell theirs, said industry insiders.

However, Grameenphone and Teletalk are yet to decide what to do with their towers.

Currently there are about 34,000 towers in the country and the new tower companies also need to build 10,000 to 15,000 more to improve service quality, especially of 4G, said Arif Al Islam, chief executive officer of Summit Towers.

“This is a difficult market for running tower business as a licensee has already been running business for some years,” he said. Telecom Secretary Shyam Sunder Sikder, BTRC acting chairman Md Jahurul Haque and senior officials were present.

The four, chosen from eight that had applied for the licences to the BTRC in June, paid Tk 25 crore as licence fee, including 15 percent VAT. Conditions stipulate that they would have to start operations within six months.

The service must reach all divisional headquarters within one year, district headquarters in two years, 30 percent of upazilas in three years, 60 percent of upazilas in four years and all upazilas in five years.