World Telecommunication Day 1999 |
Early one morning last July, a van laden with ready-made garments - one of Bangladesh's top exports - careened off the highway on its way from Dhaka, the capital, to the southeastern port of Chittagong and plunged into a roadside ditch. Luckily, the driver and his colleague survived. But they faced one problem: If they left the van to look for help from the nearest police station, they would risk the looting of the consignment. Fortunately, they were carrying a mobile phone that enabled them to contact their head office in Dhaka, which quickly sent in reinforcements to rescue the van as well as its cargo.
''Our business is highly dependent on telephones, and mobile phones in particular have positively contributed to our efficiency and competitiveness,'' says S.M. Rezaul Haque, managing director of Mascot Garments Ltd., a leading garment manufacturer and exporter. ''My cellphone works like a mobile office. It helps me to be in constant touch with the production people and managers at our different factories as well as with bankers and buyers from overseas.''
The country's burgeoning industrial and export sectors are becoming increasingly dependent on cellphones. To date, nearly 100,000 people use mobile phones in Bangladesh, including a few in remote villages. This has been made possible by the government's decision to deregulate the telecommunications sector, which until the late 1980s had been a state monopoly.
Apart from spurring private investment, this move was crucial in a country that had only one fixed-line phone for every 500 people. The condition of the fixed-line telephone system operated by the state-owned Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board was poor. For subscribers to BTTB's analog system, only two out of 10 local calls were successful. The cost of getting a connection from its digital system, introduced only a few years back, remained exorbitant, at about $500 - not to speak of the long delays before receiving a connection from BTTB, which owns some 450,000 fixed lines and plans to double the number by the year 2002.
Privatization of the telecommunications sector began in 1989, when two private companies were awarded 25-year licenses to install and operate fixed-wire lines and wireless services in rural areas - one in the country's northern and the other in the southern districts. The same year, Pacific Telecom Bangladesh, a Dhaka-based company, got the government's permission to launch the country's first cellular phone and paging service in collaboration with a Hong Kong-based company. Pacific's mobiles, sold under the brand name CityCell, had a virtual monopoly until 1996, when the government gave licenses to three more companies to operate cellphones in Bangladesh.
As these three new companies - GrameenPhone, AkTel and Sheba - entered the market, they not only helped reduce pressure on BTTB's fixed-line system, but also made mobile phones cheaper and easier to get. The price of a cellphone came down from $2,000 to as low as $130, depending on the features of the handset.
GrameenPhone (GP) is a three-way joint venture among a Bangladeshi bank, Telenor AS of Norway and the Marubeni Corp. of Japan; both AkTel and Sheba were launched by local entrepreneurs with Malaysian investment.
GP, a subsidiary company of Grameen Bank, a micro-credit institution in Bangladesh that lends money to rural women without any collateral, has introduced a new feature in its service. Any village woman who has an account with the Grameen Bank can obtain a loan of 15,000 taka ($300) to buy a Grameen set to use as a pay phone to earn some extra money by renting it to other villagers. In nearly three years of operation, GP has extended this innovative mobile phone scheme to more than 700 rural women.
Says Trond Moe, managing director of GrameenPhone: ''By giving licenses to four mobile companies, the government has ensured tough competition, which should, in the long term, benefit subscribers and ensure growth in the total business.'' The company has grown fast and currently has some 47,000 subscribers, representing nearly 50 percent of the total cellphones in the country. ''Virtually all phones in Bangladesh are in urban areas,'' says Mr. Moe, ''but we want to take it to the villages. We believe the future of mobile telephony though a capital-intensive business is quite bright in Bangladesh, with its large population.''
Mohammad Nasim, the minister for post and telecommunications, says: ''We know full well how important a role telecommunications plays in a country's economic development. That's why we are giving priority to expanding our telephone network across the country.''
Sources in the ministry say that two more private cellphone companies - Wireless Local Loop and Personal Handy Sets - have been waiting in the wings and plan to enter the market within the next six months. The sources say the number of mobile phones in Bangladesh should double by the end of 2000.
Roushan Zaman