Bangladesh to require mobile network infrastructure sharing

Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC), the country's telecoms regulator, has published its guidelines for infrastructure sharing.

Under the procedures, the operators are to be encouraged to share aspects of their network infrastructure, subject to approval from the regulator.

The guidelines are applicable for sharing of passive infrastructures; optical fiber/wired access and backbone transmission network.

The operators shall provide capacity on its infrastructure to other operators on a non-discriminatory "first come, first serve" basis, and if the two companies cannot agree on costs - the regulator will act as arbiter.

Licensees (except the Nationwide Telecommunication Transmission Network's Licensee) will not be permitted to build optical/wired backbone transmission network if such networks of other operators are already available for sharing. Incumbent operators should take necessary measures to augment the capacity of existing optical /wired backbone transmission network for sharing.

The operators will also be required to publish details of infrastructures available for sharing with other operators, although the information can be kept private between the operators and regulator.

The country currently has six operators-and according to figures from the Mobile World, ended the first half of this year with just under 43.7 million mobile subscribers - which is still a population penetration level of 28.5%. Also worth noting is that while the country has six operators, only four of them are of any significant scale, Grameenphone (20.3m), Banglalink (9.5m) and Aktel (7.8m) and finally, Warid Telecom (3.3m). The two remaining long term incumbents, Citycell and Teletalk add up to 2.7 million customers between them.