Mobile phone operators have been charging high for the ‘pay as you go’ or ‘P1’ internet package for the past seven years despite the internet bandwidth price having fallen several times in that period.
Grameenphone, for instance, charges Tk 20 for every megabyte (MB) used under the P1 package, meaning a usage of 1 gigabyte (GB) would set a subscriber back by Tk 20,000.
But the operator charges less than Tk 2 for every MB in its other internet packages, such as the ‘minipack’ costing Tk 29, which provides 15 MB.
“I was just surfing Facebook and Bloomberg the other day and my charges came to Tk 200. I used up 10 MB of data,” said a Grameenphone subscriber.
Banglalink, the country’s second largest operator in terms of subscription, offers the same rate of Tk 20 for per MB of data used to its pre-paid customers.
Robi Axiata, Airtel Bangladesh and even the state-owned Teletalk follow the same tariff for their ‘pay as you go’ internet packages.
A Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) official said the internet price was slashed several times over the last few years but the operators are basing their P1 packages on the old bandwidth price of Tk 70,000 for 1 megabit per second (Mbps).
“The commission is planning to reduce the overall tariff rate of the P1 packages,” he said.
The BTRC official said the mobile operators purchase unlimited bandwidth from the internet gateways at Tk 8,000 for per Mbps — but they sell it to the subscribers at a higher rate.
“The same operators are offering Tk 275 to Tk 350 for 1 Gbps (gigabit per second) data for their subscribers. If any customer does not shift from the P1 packages, he/she will have to pay a lot of money for surfing the internet,” said the official.
But the high charges would not feel like a rip-off if the mobile internet speed was good. In reality, the speed of 1Kbps to 12 Kbps is very slow, with the connection flickering on most occasions.
Of the 2.94 crore internet users in the country, 2.77 crore use the mobile internet, according to BTRC data.
Kazi Monirul Kabir, the chief communications officer of Grameenphone, said the operator discourages the subscribers from using the P1 package and is taking steps to make it as cost-effective as possible.
“Prepaid customers using the P1 package would not get any internet connection after using up Tk 20 worth of data as the company has installed a cap on it. But post-paid customers receive SMSs [when internet usage hits the Tk 20-mark] to shift to other packages.”
Shihab Ahmad, director (marketing) of Banglalink, said P1 package is comparatively costly and suitable for the irregular users. There are other good packages for the regular internet users, he said.
Mohiuddin Babar, vice president (communication and CSR) of Robi, said once voice tariff was also very high, which was slashed down on several occasions.
Robi will moderate and review the prices of its internet packages according to the demand of the customers and the market, he said.
Courtesy of The Daily Star
