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| .bd Bangladesh |
| Samudra E. Haque |
The year 2003 proved to be difficult; and stakeholders of the ICT industry, as they geared up to provide viable services to content producers, ISPs and consumers, had to accept the cold fact that Bangladesh has a long way to go in developing the necessary policy and legal framework to properly administer the country’s public communications infrastructure. Although sales of consumer products such as mobile phones, desktop computers, printers, modems and networking equipment were observed to be increasing every month, the use of ICT remained confined to entertainment, voice communication, and basic Internet access for browsing and email. This was a period during which a number of positive steps were taken by developers, service providers and users to apply the new technologies in ways that would benefit the country. However, overall growth of the ICT industry was hampered during 2003 and 2004 by loose coordination and cooperation between private and public sector agencies, as well as a widely perceived lack of long-term vision at top-level policy-making bodies, despite ICT being declared a "thrust sector" in many forums. Industries Internet and telecommunications services The
Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) reported that there
were 150 registered ISP licence holders ('licensed' often does not mean operational)
at the end of 2003. Among these licensees, 14 were registered as "nationwide
service providers". Regular ISPs and nationwide ISPs are distinguished by
the level of licence fees and their business plans. BTRC does not currently provide
information on the service areas of the active licensees, but interviews with
key informants show that there are 49 operational ISPs in Dhaka, 14 in Chittagong,
6 in Sylhet, and only a handful in all the other districts combined. Most of these
ISPs are hybrid service providers supplying dial-up, wireless and DSL services. BTRC also reported 67 VSAT systems registered in the country belonging to ISPs, software developers, and companies using the stations for internal communication. Apart from these registered stations, there are a number of unauthorised VSAT systems in use that are well hidden to avoid detection. The unauthorised VSATs are almost all used to provide illegal call-termination (into Bangladesh) or calling-card services for international calls (from Bangladesh to the world). Information about these unauthorised services can be easily obtained on the Web or at local grocery shops and supermarkets. It is obvious that many of these services are backed by well-managed business organisations that seem to be immune to the law or are tolerated by the authorities as they operate within a "grey area" of the telecommunications policy. With this number of satellite ground assets, one would expect a large amount of data communication taking place, but the concept of sharing, or parallel use, of common infrastructure has so far not taken hold. It seems that BTRC has chosen largely to omit to follow up on its mandate to conduct inspections and, where necessary, to regulate against illegal usage, or to gather all the stakeholders for a roundtable discussion on updating and modernising rules relating to public communications services. It has instead issued a large number of licences to applicants without consideration for earlier entrants in the same sector or geographical area. The confusion of the role of BTRC is, however, understandable and probably will take more than a few years to resolve. . . . . . the complete text of this chapter is available for purchase and immediate download as a PDF file, please click here for more information. |
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