Mobile phone users rise to four-month high

The number of mobile phone users rose to a four-month high in July while internet connections continued to soar in another signal that the country's economic recovery is gaining pace.

Mobile phone users totalled 16.43 crore in July, the highest since April, the first month that started to witness the full impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

The figure is 1.36 per cent higher than 16.21 crore customers the country's four mobile phone operators had combined in the same month a year ago, data from the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) showed. 

At the end of the first month of the ongoing fiscal year, market leader Grameenphone had 7.6 crore mobile phone subscribers, up 0.86 per cent year-on-year. The largest mobile phone operator had returned to almost pre-pandemic levels of 7.586 crore it posted in February.  

Robi Axiata's customer base expanded by 2.85 per cent year-on-year to 4.91 crore in July. It had 4.96 crore subscribers in February.

Banglalink's number of customers fell by 0.86 per cent to 3.44 crore in July. It had 3.58 crore customers in February.

Year-on-year, state-run Teletalk's customer base expanded the most among all operators, by 10.69 per cent to 46.81 lakh. Compared to February, it is yet to return to the pre-pandemic level of 48.73 lakh.  

"Following a devastating blow of the coronavirus pandemic on our business, it is very encouraging to see a positive picture on customer acquisition in July," said Shahed Alam, chief corporate and regulatory officer of Robi Axiata.

"However, we think it is too late to conclude that we have left the pandemic behind us as the rate of churn is also very high at this moment. We don't see the situation stabilising somewhat before the end of the year," he added.

The churn rate, also known as the rate of attrition or customer churn, is the rate at which subscribers stop doing business with an entity.

The number of internet users rose 10.6 per cent to 10.64 crore at the end of July, reaching a new high. It was 9.99 crore in February, BTRC data showed.

Internet use has increased significantly since the pandemic hit Bangladesh in March as people relied on it to work remotely, communicate, buy things online and make payments.

In Bangladesh, internet usage is dominated by mobile internet. In July, 9.78 crore subscribers were accessing internet through mobile phones, while the rest 85.71 lakh through internet service providers and public switched telephone network operators.

The number of people using internet on their mobile phones rose 8.23 per cent in July. The number of broadband internet users surged 50 per cent.

There were 9.42 crore mobile internet users and 57.43 lakh broadband internet users in February.

MA Hakim, president of the Internet Service Providers Association Bangladesh (ISPAB), said people have become dependent on internet to perform many tasks during the coronavirus pandemic. Today, the internet has become a necessity.

The consumption of broadband rose from about 1,500 gigabytes before the pandemic to about 1,750 gigabytes now.

Previously, growth in fixed-broadband internet penetration mostly came from metropolitan cities such as Dhaka, Chattogram and Sylhet. Now, consumption is growing across the country and even in small towns and rural areas, Hakim said.

He said Bangladesh is connecting its unions through the setting up of 20,000km optical fibre cable. But the capacity of this network is largely being unused.

If the government provides the unused portion of the cable to the private sector at a nominal cost, it would be possible to provide internet to the users in small towns and villages at cheaper cost, he said.

The penetration rate of fixed-broadband is about 6 per cent in Bangladesh and the government has targeted to raise it to 15 per cent by 2021, said Bikarna Kumar Ghosh, project director of the Info Sarkar Phase 3.

Under the project, the government has connected 2,400 unions through the optical fibre cable so far and the rest 200 unions would be connected by December this year.

The state-run Bangladesh Telecommunications Company has already connected 1,200 unions. The ICT Division is undertaking a project to connect 617 more unions by 2021. About 100 unions would be connected by satellite, according to Ghosh.

"This will connect the whole Bangladesh," he said, adding that households would have to secure connections from ISPs.