The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) opened its January spectrum auction, expecting the high-stakes competition typical of vital national infrastructure sales. Instead, the room fell silent.
Grameenphone acquired 10 MHz of the 700 MHz band at the base reserve price of Tk2,370 crore, Robi withdrew, while Banglalink stayed away from the bidding, leaving 10 MHz of the unsold spectrum to be assigned later to state-owned Teletalk at the same rate.
Failing to attract competition, this transaction left policy-makers with a critical question: How can such an auction dictate the pricing of an upcoming renewal cycle?
The short answer is it cannot. True market value requires viable alternatives where operators bid for expansion, not survival. Spectrum renewal offers no such luxury.
Once a mobile operator anchors its network architecture around a specific band and deploys thousands of base stations, walking away is no longer an option. A renewal price has little to do with market value; it is apparently a reflection of short-term state treasury demands colliding with an operator's inability to walk away without shutting down their business.
This structural disconnect matters as Bangladesh approaches the November renewal of spectrum in the 900 MHz, 1.8 GHz, and 2.1 GHz bands. Data from the GSMA’s 2025 study reveals that Bangladesh’s spectrum costs consume 15.7% of operators’ recurring revenues, much higher than the Asia-Pacific median of 10.4% and the global median of 7.7%.
Macroeconomic modeling suggests that cutting this economic burden to half could unlock $34 billion in cumulative economic benefits by 2035 and a 75% reduction could generate $45bn. These numbers are no prescription to slash prices; rather, they must be weighed against the state’s undeniable fiscal duty to manage a public asset.
At the same time, operators need capital for advanced radios and network upgrades. The real policy challenge is not finding an arbitrary, magic price per megahertz, but ensuring that every megahertz becomes highly productive.
The spectrum efficiency mismatch
Spectrum productivity is best measured by its capacity for dense urban hubs, wider coverage for rural villages, and reliable network quality during peak hours. Yet, BTRC data exposes a deep structural imbalance in our airwaves.
State-owned Teletalk holds 65.2 MHz for just 6.8 million subscribers, while Grameenphone must squeeze 84.4 million subscribers into 137.4 MHz. Serving remote terrain explains part of this gap, but not all of it.
When rigid frameworks lock spectrum in underutilized silos while urban networks suffer from congestion, the scarcity becomes artificial. Because traffic patterns shift constantly, a band that was adequate five years ago may leave one city congested today while sitting idle in another. If frequency blocks cannot move dynamically to match this shifting public demand, the consumer experience inevitably degrades, and the broader digital economy suffers.
Global precedents and cautious tales
Other nations have long recognized that draining an operator's capital through high upfront spectrum fees may starve the investments needed for network rollouts. Many have shifted toward models that trade immediate financial burdens for guaranteed socio-economic outcomes.
India addressed artificial scarcity by legalizing spectrum trading and sharing, allowing rights to move toward operators facing heavy traffic. Its framework permitted transfers subject to spectrum caps, roll-out obligations, eligibility conditions and a two-year holding period, with a 1% transfer fee.
Similarly, Austria and Colombia tied their low-band spectrum licensing directly to rural coverage, allowing operators to earn explicit fee discounts or convert coverage commitments into cash-equivalent credits. Spain and Canada chose to extend license terms or waive upfront renewal fees where operators could demonstrate minimum population coverage, giving companies the necessary breathing room to amortize massive hardware investments.
The warnings from the global markets should also be watched closely. In its multi-band auction, Pakistan cut reserve prices on legacy bands by more than 50%, yet those bands still drew no bids.
This proved that artificial benchmarks fail to create demand for spectrum that lacks commercial viability. In contrast, Vietnam demonstrates the power of flexible strategic asset pricing; after a failed 2023 auction, it slashed reserve prices by nearly 80%, separating long-term economic utility from the temptation of short-term cash extraction to rapidly achieve roughly 90% 5G coverage by early 2026.
Meanwhile, other regulatory experiments show distinct operational challenges: Austria faced ambiguity over how coverage would be measured. Colombia’s process was criticized for hiding minimum bids in advance while miscalculating rural rollout costs.
Finally, Canada’s model serves as a direct warning; its rigid obligation conditions drove up holding costs without incentivizing efficient use, creating long-term operational inefficiencies after the regulator ignored industry challenges during consultations.
Navigating toward balanced regulation
To break out of the cycle of revenue-maximizing deadlocks and deteriorating network quality, Bangladesh needs a pragmatic, forward-looking approach. Rather than exhausting operator liquidity through high upfront hurdles, BTRC can incentivize infrastructure development by recalibrating its renewal fees into a more manageable, back-loaded payment timeline.
To protect the state’s interests, the time value of money can be maintained through transparent indexation, while operators preserve the vital cash flow.
Furthermore, the regulator can introduce an infrastructure offset mechanism. Operators should be allowed to discharge a defined portion of their renewal fees through verified capital investments in high-priority public infrastructure.
To ensure transparency, these projects must be selected from a pre-approved national registry, such as expanding coverage in deep rural unions, and undergo rigorous independent valuation.
This framework must carry strict non-delivery penalties and exclude any publicly subsidized projects to prevent double counting.
Crucially, these renewed licenses should mandate measurable outcomes:
- expanded capacity in congested cities;
- wider coverage in underserved villages;
- improved busy-hour performance;
- stronger backhaul resilience
Such a spectrum-for-investment bargain remains credible if the measurement framework is indisputable. Methodology, sampling, thresholds, and audit rights must be fixed before renewal.
Bangladesh has learned this the hard way; a Tk 21 crore network quality testing system deployed by the BTRC in 2022 failed to yield a conclusive public report for years simply because the regulator and operators could not agree on measurement metrics.
Fortunately, that gap is finally closing with the commission’s recent approval of a tighter, collaboratively developed drive-test protocol, which provides the necessary baseline for future enforcement.
Unleashing a flexible secondary market
Frequency blocks must be allowed to flow where the users essentially are. The BTRC should formalize a secondary market framework that permits operators to lease or temporarily transfer underutilized spectrum under clear competition rules.
This must be backed by a strict anti-hoarding policy. If an operator leaves an assigned band materially underused across a specific region for more than 18 months, they must deploy it against agreed performance indicators, open it for voluntary localized sharing, or surrender it back to the national pool.
This flexibility should be driven by real-time monitoring. Instead of allowing expensive auditing tools to sit idle, the regulator should leverage its updated field-testing capabilities to publish monthly, region-specific network performance reports.
Linking continued spectrum retention to these localized, busy-hour quality audits will transform transparency into an enforcement tool, forcing operators to prioritize real-world delivery over asset hoarding.
Redefining success in telecom governance
The current policy standoff is primarily behavioral -- regulators are historically evaluated on immediate treasury targets, while operators pile up spectrum to protect market share without optimizing performance.
We must redefine what institutional achievement looks like in telecommunication governance. A spectrum renewal cycle should not be evaluated by the volume of cash deposited into the treasury on day one.
Instead, its true dividends should be measured by expanded coverage, fewer dropped calls, faster internet speeds, and the seamless rollout of next-generation 5G networks.
On the corporate side, operators must be pushed to move away from vanity metrics. Total SIM card registrations tell us really nothing about actual digital utility.
Instead, the regulatory framework should compel corporations to publicly report active data users per megahertz per base station.
This simple shift forces corporate focus toward capital efficiency and network optimization rather than defensive asset hoarding.
Protecting the consumer
A high spectrum price functions as a regressive tax on the end consumer, directly stalling smartphone adoption and digital literacy in underserved communities.
By lowering upfront spectrum barriers and ensuring sufficient capacity, the per-gigabyte cost for operators drops.
The regulatory framework must ensure these savings are passed down to low-income tiers through affordable, high-volume data packages tailored for students, marginal farmers, and micro-entrepreneurs.
Directing infrastructure offsets specifically toward hard-to-reach and climate-vulnerable coastal communities ensures that our digital safety net, including mobile financial services, telemedicine, and online education, becomes accessible for the whole population, rather than a privilege concentrated within a few major metropolitan centers.
Building the digital nation
By November, the thousands of telecommunication antennas stretching across Bangladesh’s skylines will point exactly where they point today. The critical question for our future is whether the licenses governing those radio frequencies will simply preserve a congested network or lay the groundwork for tomorrow's digital economy.
A cheap megahertz that remains underutilized does nothing for national development. An overpriced megahertz that depletes an operator's investment capacity behaves no differently.
The state does not hold the radio spectrum to act as a mere fee collector; it holds it in trust as a scarce public resource. The real test of the upcoming renewal cycle is not how much revenue the state collects per megahertz; it is the quality of the digital nation emerging on the ground.
Dr Sabbir Ahmad is a tech executive with global experience in digital connectivity, sustainable infrastructure and energy. He is shaping Bangladesh's semiconductor landscape as the CEO of Silicon Array Ltd. Email: sabbir@ieee.org.