The mobile phone operators have agreed to slash the internet price following increasing pressure from the users and different organisations,
said Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission officials.
The mobile phone operators gave their consent for reducing the internet price for the end users in a meeting with the BTRC chairman Sunil Kanti Bose on last Thursday.
‘The operators will submit a proposal by this week and after that we will finalise the price shortly,’ a BTRC official told New Age.
He said the mobile phone companies had agreed to reduce the internet price following increasing pressure from different quarters.
On Wednesday last, a delegation of the information and communications technology related organisations met the BTRC high-ups and urged them to reduce the internet price for the users.
They said the government had reduced the price in phases, but the service providers did not cut the price accordingly.
They also announced to stage a sit-in in front of the BTRC office on July 12 if their demand was not met.
According to the draft amendment of the joint directive of 2010, the commission 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.
It said the mobile phone operators should cut down the price of internet package by half from Tk 0.02 a kilobyte.
Besides, a subscriber can use up to Tk 100 under the P1 package and if the subscriber wants to use more than the amount, he or she has to migrate to other packages, it said.
BTRC officials alleged the commission high-ups had been delaying the amendment due to pressure from the mobile companies.
-With New Age input
