Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission has decided to formulate a cost model to determine the pricing of different services of mobile telecom companies, said BTRC officials. They said BTRC would appoint a consultant soon for the cost modelling of the telcos. The voice service, short and multimedia massage service, video call service and value-added services will be included in the cost modelling.
‘All the service pricing are proposed by the telecom companies and we negotiate to lower the price based on that. There is no cost model for most of the services other than the voice service,’ a senior BTRC official told New Age on Tuesday.
He said the cost model would determine the cost of each segment of each of the services provided by the mobile operators. ‘And based on that we will formulate the pricing,’ he said.
He said the BTRC recently fell into an embarrassing situation about the mobile financial service pricing as there was no cost modelling for that service.
‘Although the question was raised about the regulatory periphery at that time as mobile banking is bank-led model in Bangladesh and Bangladesh Bank should be the one to determine the pricing. But when we sit with the BB and they asked on what cost model we determine the pricing we had not answer,’ he said.
The BB in January decided that it would formulate a cost model to determine the pricing of mobile financial services in the country after the telecom regulator came up with a directive on the matter.
The BTRC later suspended the directive and shifted the pricing to BB.
Another BTRC official said there is serious concern over the internet package pricing by the mobile operators.
He said the BTRC has reduced in phases the internet bandwidth price to as low as Tk 8,000 a megabyte in 2012, which was Tk 72,000 in 2004, but the mobile phone operators continued to charge P1 package subscribers at the same rate for the last eight years.
‘When we ask, the mobile companies say that bandwidth is not the only pricing component. As other pricing components are getting costly so they cannot reduce the price. We should also look into that,’ he said.
-With New Age input
