The country’s leading mobile phone operators are moving into the land phone business as they have received permission to run PABX services.
Grameenphone is already providing the service of private automatic branch exchange (PABX) for two defence wings and other corporate offices, while Banglalink got permission on June 23.
Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) terms the services as ‘m-Centrex’ and at the same time restricts ‘Mobile PABX’ or ‘Virtual Mobile PABX’ or ‘Virtual PABX’ or ‘Wireless PABX’ or ‘PABX’ for market communication through the service.
There is a common solutions hotline, a single call centre support number run by specially trained customer service personnel to deliver superior aftersales customer experience for m-Centrex customers.
“m-Centrex is a convenient ‘One Number Solution’ which ensures mobility and business efficiency for a company,” a Grameenphone spokesperson told the Dhaka Tribune.
He said: “This is a convenient solution for corporate organisations. Such a solution is expected to make life easy for busy on-the-go corporate executives who want to be connected and for companies who always look for innovative and cost effective business solutions.”
Banglalink, the second leading mobile phone operator in the country in terms of subscribers claimed that they are ready and shall go for commercial launching of the service very soon.
“The service is mainly land phone based but in our country but land phones are becoming obsolete. So we grabbed the opportunity and it has very high demand,” a high official of Banglalink told the Dhaka Tribune.
It extends fixed-line exchange functionality to mobile devices such as mobile handsets, smart-phones etc by provisioning them as extensions. This service is applicable to business solutions customers.
Indian and Pakistani subscribers enjoy the service while Thailand has pioneered this service.
Grameenphone received permission to operate this service on December 2011 as the first mobile operator after six months of piloting.
BTRC gave permission to Banglalink till December 31 of this year. And at the same time they changed Grameenphone’s approval status and limited their activity till December 31. However, at the time the approval was given to Grameenphone the status was not restricted by any time frame.
Officials of these two operators said that users may be attracted but when they get to know about the time limitation they may not be so interested.
A Grameenphone high official said, corporate clients with call centres are interested about this service.
At the same time there is an option to use it as a toll free service for the users’ customers but nobody yet has approached for such service.
Banglalink claimed that they have already received lots of interests from corporate offices.
According to BRTC directives the operator can charge Tk50 per user if any for customers that have 150 subscribers. From 76 to 150 users they can charge a maximum of Tk75 per user. For 51 to 75 connections the charge limit per connection is Tk100, for 21-50 connections the maximum rate charged per customer will be Tk125 and for 11-20 connections they may charge Tk150 per user.
