The visiting Orascom Telecom chief executive officer Ahmed Abou Doma on Saturday said that the draft 3G licensing and value added-service guidelines ‘will put many foreign investments off the country.’
Abou Doma, addressing a press conference at the Westin hotel in the capital, also asked the regulator and the government to reach a consensus with telecoms operators before putting into the final form the guidelines for the ‘best of the country.’
‘The proposed 3G and VAS guidelines will not help investments in the country’s telecoms sector,’ he said.
According to the 3G guidelines proposed by the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, each operator needs to spend Tk 100 million in licence fee, Tk 1.5 billion in bank guarantee and Tk 0.5 million in application fee.
The base price of a MHz spectrum is fixed at $30 million which means each telecoms operator needs to pay $ 300 million for a 10 MHz spectrum. In addition, each operator further needs to spend Tk 50 million in licence renewal fee each year.
The operators will also need to share 5.5 per cent of the revenue to the government and 1 per cent in social obligation fee.
Doma said that the enforcement of the proposed 3G guidelines would not make business viable and would, rather, make business costlier.
As for proposed VAS guideline, he said, ‘I have never heard that any country in the world has adopted a similar VAS guideline.’
The government wants to create content developers with the guideline but it may not bring about expected results as the government needs made it mandatory for such developers to have licences, he said.
Value-added service is a non-core telecoms service. Services beyond standard voice calls and fax transmissions generally fall under value-added service. In mobile industry, technologies such as SMS, MMS and GPRS are usually considered value-added services.
Talking about Banglalink’s progress, Doma, who was CEO of Banglalink between 2009 and 2011, said that the company had reached the milestone of 25 million subscribers.
In response to a question, he said that the Egypt-based Orascom Telecom’s investment in Bangladesh was approaching $ 2 billion in more than seven years of its operation in the country.
-With New Age input
