At least 15% of Citycell subscribers, the country’s oldest mobile phone operator, have been without network since Friday night.
According to Citycell officials, more than 250,000 subscribers went out of network.
They said the dilemma occurred because of a hard disk crash on their database.
“We are trying our level best to solve the problem. We have already recovered networks of about 200,000 subscribers, only a few are left,” Mehboob Chowdhury, chief executive officer of Citycell told the Dhaka Tribune yesterday.
“The tension would ease within hours of the problem being solved,” he said.
Many Citycell subscribers, mostly from the capital, said they had been facing disruptions on their mobile networks since Friday evening.
Some even went out of network at night, they alleged.
Contacted, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission officials said they did not know anything about the issue.
“Hearing about the debacle, we thought that Citycell’s license might have been cancelled as the is-sue had been on discussion for quite some time,” said Hafiza Begum, an advocate of Chief Metropol-itan Magistrate
Court.
Earlier on Wednesday, BTRC issued a letter to Citycell giving a 15-day ultimatum to pay its license renewal fee, revenue sharing and social obligation fund and annual spectrum charges, totalling to an amount of around Tk2.5b.
Failure to deposit the outstanding amount within the deadline, Citycell would lose its license as per the decision of BTRC, which came on November 24.
However, a Citycell official said they had not faced any problem regarding the license yet.
“After solving the problem we will send SMSs to the affected subscribers’ regretting the inconven-ience. We will also compensate them with Tk20 which will be valid for next 15 days” the official add-ed.
For last 18 months, the number of Citycell subscribers has been declining continuously.
In October the number came down to 1,340,000 which was 1,800,000 in April 2012.
45% of Citycell is owned by Singapore’s SingTel, 31.43% by Pacific Motors Ltd and 23.57% by Far East Telecom Ltd.
SingTel had stopped funding Citycell in 2012, and according to its 2013 annual report it placed a zero value in its ownership stake in Citycell.
Earlier this year, other telecom operators of the country faced similar problems with their networks while processing 3G services.