Bangladesh market is not yet ready for the latest mobile phone technology called Long Term Evolution (LTE) as the country is still far away from creating a business environment congenial for introducing the technology in the country.
Global Telecom experts, who are attending a three-day Commonwealth Telecommunication Organisation (CTO) forum that began in the city on Monday, came up with the view yesterday.
Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the name given to a project within the Third Generation Partnership Project to improve the UMTS mobile phone standard to cope with future requirements.
Attending the 2nd day meet, the experts from home and abroad said as the LTE handsets are very costly and the penetration of this kind of sets is still very thin while relevant application or contents are also not yet easily available for using the high speed mobile technology in Bangladesh.
According to the director general of Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC), who attended a seminar styled “4G LTE or is Too Soon” said, “Only 3% of Bangladeshi mobile users use high-end handsets and only around 10% handsets are 3G enabled.”
Although the government of Bangladesh had earlier issued LTE licenses to the three WiMax operators last year, they could not launch the service in the country as yet.
Describing about the readiness of business ecosystem for the LTE service in Bangladesh, BTRC director general Brig. General Md Wahid-Uz-Zaman categorically noted that only 6% revenue comes from the data business though there are 37 million internet users in Bangladesh.
“The market needs to be more matured for introducing LTE services. We need to sit with the government, stakeholders including the central bank and National Board of Revenue (NBR) to create an environment suitable for LTE technology in the country.”
He also said the quality broadband in Bangladesh still costs around Tk1,000 for 1 megabits-per-second speed, which is far less than the average revenue per users (ARPU) for voice services.
While attending an inaugural session on Monday, BTRC Chairman Sunil Kanti Bose also notably mentioned that the government had a target that there would be 60% internet penetration by the year of 2021 and out this number, 35% would be broadband users.
Currently less than 4% users use high speed internet service.
At the yesterday’s discussion, Monir Hasan, a director of Grameenphone, focused on the scarcity of the contents or applications for the users.
He said the local content developers are interested in Android or Apple Stores, instead of the local market. The government should sit with all the stakeholders to go for a solution on this problem.
The price of LTE compatible devices was around US$500 during last year but the price has been reduced to around $250 this year, said Harish Bhatt, a Mobile Broadband Network consultant of Huawei Technologies Bangladesh Ltd.
Huawei is a Chinese vendor that produces mobile equipments and devices.
Bhatt added the handset price will be slashed further when more operators will launch the service. Operators of the world’s two biggest mobile markets China and India have already launched LTE, so handsets price will be slashed in the coming years, he, however, hoped.
The LTE goals include improving efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and better integration with other open standards. The LTE project is not a standard, but it will result in the new evolved release 8 of the UMTS standard, including mostly or wholly extensions and modifications of the UMTS system.