Grameenphone, the market leader mobile phone operator in the country, uses more than half the total bandwidth being consumed in the country every day, suggests figures compiled by the Dhaka Tribune.
Of the total 127 Tara Bites (TB) bandwidth consumed every day by the four operators – Grameenphone, Robi, Banglalink and Airtel – the market leader company shares 65 TB bandwidth.
Though GP crossed five crore landmark in terms of active SIM users in September with 42% market share, it loses market share in terms of internet use.
According to sources, the operator has 1.4 crore internet users – over 95 lakh 2G and over 44 lakh 3G.
Banglalink said it has more than 1.17 crore active internet users under its network, but consumes only 22 TB of bandwidth every day.
The operator’s 3G data users are 10.41 lakh while the rest (1.06 crore) belong to 2G category. The company has 3 crore active SIM users till the end of September.
According to Robi, it has more than 1.15 crore data users but shares only 32 TB data every day.
GP said it would increase sharing data though the company is currently using 65 TB daily.
“Under our network the use of data is on the rise and we hope it will increase more and more,” Chief Executive Officer Vivek Sood told the Dhaka Tribune recently.
The outgoing CEO also said 3G subscribers are mainly consuming a huge volume of data.
“It was only 14 to 15 TBs even in April last year which came to 65 TBs currently and it is going up day by day,” he added.
Vivek added that they are using a definition about counting data users though Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) doesn’t have any definition about who the data users are and who are not.
“We know how to identify the number of internet users from our subscribers end. Lots of users activated GP internet, but do not use so much data. We detect them from our data number list,” he added.
According to Vivek, subscribers that use at least 150kb data for three months at a stretch are only counted as internet users.
“Under our network there are more than 60 lakh Facebook users and I believe Facebook can be the driving force for increasing internet penetrations in the country,” said the CEO. According to Robi, it is not following any official definition about the data users but said most of its users consume more than one GB data every month.
The number four operator, Airtel, said its data subscribers use 8 TBs bandwidth every day. Airtel has so far 33.38 lakh internet users till September. Of them, 6.29 lakh data users belong to 3G connections.
The four cellphone operators were awarded 3G licences in September 2013 after a spectrum auction in which GP acquired 10 megahertz of spectrum and the rest 5 megahertz each.
State-owned operator, Teletalk, has acquired more than 15 lakh 3G subscribers but not obtained any 3G licence so far and had been offering the fastest data services since October 2012 as part of its “commercial test.”
The cellphone company got 10 megahertz spectrum in the auction price but hadn’t paid any money so far, the regulator sources said.
