Grameenphone, the market leader mobile phone operator, has brought all the 64 district headquarters and 197 thanas under the fastest mobile data service (3G).
Being the first operator of the country, Grameenphone yesterday formally came up with the disclosure that it has successfully been able to reach the target to cover all the districts across the country as per its promise.
But Grameenphone has so far covered one fourth of their total sites though they have covered the headquarters. They covered 2,145 sites out of 8,500 sites with 3G, according to sources.
Addressing a press conference Vivek Sood, Chief executive officer (CEO) of the operator made this formal announcement as saying, “This is the fastest 3G-rollout in the history of Telenor Group, and a critical part of our ambition to provide Internet for all.”
“We are proud of the progress so far, but also humble to the fact that both coverage and awareness must increase in order to bring more people under the experience of 3G,” Sood added.
Vivek Sood informed that they are now working with devices end with their partners.
He also said: When they launched 3G in the country last October the cheapest 3G enable handsets price was US$80, currently it came down close to $57 and they are going to offer it with their partners less than $50, around Tk3,850.
Currently Grameenphone has 4 lakh 3G users and around 10,000 activation every day. Not only Smartphones Grameenphone is also going to offer feature phone for 2G internet with a cost of Tk1,700 and 3G modem Tk1,500 only.
Out of their 4.8 core active subscribers currently 40% are under the 3G network, Tanveer Mohammad, CTO of Grameenphone told the reports.
The CTO also said they had a plan to cover all the districts headquarters by April and they made it well before a month.
“Political unrests, frequent hartals and other disturbance eaten half of our working days but we kept our promises,” Tanveer added.
Grameenphone claimed them as the largest national broadband service provider as it used to say: “Some 40% of our customers are currently under 3G coverage and approximately 85% of 3G enabled devices can access the 3G network.”
According to 3G guideline, there is a network expansion obligation to cover 64 districts headquarters by 36 months, but the leading operator took one sixth time for cover all the districts of the timeline, he also informed.
Earlier, Grameenphone has taken 10 megahertz spectrum for 3G auction on September 8 and awarded license very next week of that.
They started test run from September 18 in different places in the capital and launched 3G commercially from first week of October 8. l
State owned operator Teletalk running 3G before one year than Grameenphone only covers 17 districts.
Airtel covers nine districts, while Banglalink covers five districts with 3G service. Robi also took 3G license, but network deployment is slow than others.
