Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission on Tuesday asked mobile phone operators to reduce the internet price within July 30,
but the commission did not set any standard to this end.
The BTRC in a meeting with the mobile phone operators on the day asked them to review the price and lower it ‘significantly’, sources said.
‘We were asked to lower the internet price significantly by July 30. The commission left the price reduction margin on the operators and each company will reduce the price according to their own strategies,’ said a senior official of a mobile company present in the meeting.
The meeting was presided over by BTRC vice-chairman Md Giasuddin Ahmed where representatives of Grameenphone, Banglalink, Citycell and Airtel were present.
Meanwhile, a section of information and technology activists formed a human chain on the Kamal Ataturk Avenue at Banani in the city on the day demanding price cut for internet.
They demanded the price for 1MBps internet should be TK 0.10 and for 1GBps the price should be Tk 10.
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
