The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission on Wednesday again invited interested international parties to apply for the job of spectrum consultant to make a roadmap for spectrum management after failing to find one in the first attempts.
The interested candidates will have to apply by August 31, said BTRC officials.
They said the consultant would determine the accusation fees and yearly charges for the 3G and Long Term Evaluation or 4G spectrum bands of the country.
They also said the consultant would also be determining the spectrum requirement for the operators and prepare a band release plan according to the need.
‘We will prepare an extensive roadmap for the telecom sector and under that we will prepare a spectrum management plan for the next 15 years,’ a senior BTRC official told New Age.
He said the consultant would help the regulator prepare the spectrum plan and also train BTRC and telecom ministry officials about the best practices of spectrum use.
‘The consultant will also prepare a guideline about the spectrums which are used for satellite-based services,’ he said.
The BTRC in 2008 had formulated the first roadmap for telecom industry with 20 action plans.
The BTRC in last few years conducted several auctions and drafted some policies under the first roadmap.
In September last year the BTRC conducted the 3G spectrum auction where four private mobile phone companies took licence for 3G services.
In the auction Grameenphone took 10MHz spectrum while Banglalink, Robi and Airtel took 5MHz spectrum each at the price of $21 million a MHz.
The BTRC in October 2013 amended the BWA (Broadband Wireless Access) guideline which allowed the WiMAX operators to operate in any frequency band, including 700 MHz and 2,600MHz, if they wished.
The Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh, however, opposed the move saying it created uneven licensing regime in the country.
The association said that in the National Frequency Allocation Plan the 2,600MHZ was mainly marked for mobile telecommunications and reserved for mobile operators.
It also said the possible allocation of 700 MHz and 900 MHz, which are popular frequencies for the LTE technology, could be a constraint for the mobile industry.
The AMTOB also said that the process to determine the value of the spectrum for the BWA operators was not specified in the guideline.
The telecom regulator recently formed a special committee to prepare auction for 700-band spectrums for the telecom operators.
-With New Age input
