The international incoming phone calls channeled legally have increased about 14% to around 985 crore minutes in the January-July period this year as compared to the same period last year, contributing substantially to boost revenues.
Drives against illegal call termination help to increase the revenue, according to the sources at Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC).
“The regulator conducted lots of operation against illegal calls in last couple of months, contributing to increased legal calls,” a senior official of engineering wing of BTRC told the Dhaka Tribune.
He said the number of expatriate Bangladeshis is also increasing, which has also helped to increase the incoming calls. The earnings from the calls rose to about $296m during the first half of 2014 compared to $241m one year earlier, according to figures of BTRC.
BTRC gave the figures to parliamentary standing committee on Post, Telecommunications and Information Technology.
The telecom regulator has fixed the incoming international call termination rate at $0.03 per minutes for the International Gateway (IGW) operators, which also came under a legal banking channel.
Though BTRC is yet to announce the statistics officially, it had submitted a working paper that included the figures at a parliamentary standing committee meeting held recently. That’s why none of the high officials of the telecom watchdog agreed to make any comment on it.
According to the working paper’s statistics, the phone call market terminated 180 crore minutes call in March, which was the highest of all months.
The legal call termination was only 141 crore minutes in January this year, which was the lowest in six months.
It registered legal calls of 150 crore minutes in February, 170 crore minutes in April, 175 crore minutes in May and 160 crore minutes in June.
Officials, however, predicted that the number of legal calls would be higher in July than the previous months because of the Eid festival.
According to BTRC’s annual report, 29 IGW operators terminated 1,732 crore minutes in 2013 in comparison with 1,342 crore minutes in 2012.
The then government awarded around 25 private IGW licences along with existing four IGW operators in 2012 among the ruling party men including the cabinet members and politically influential people.
As all the new operators came to operation in 2012, the number of legal calls termination fell drastically.
The four IGWs terminated 1,686 crore minutes in 2011, which was 1,570 crore minutes in 2010, according to BTRC statistics.
According to the IGW guidelines, from the earning of every $0.03, operators are bound to share 51.75% to the government and 15% to the Interconnection Exchange (ICX) and 20% to the mobile or land line operators, which received the calls.
But if anybody can bypass the calls through a gray route that does not need to share any revenue with the government and the ICXs, the money won’t come to the country.
There has been an allegation that around 3 crore minutes of calls are being terminated illegally each day in the country.
“Currently there are around 6 crore-minute calls per day, but there are crores of minutes of calls are being terminated through gray routes, and if the regulator can take proper initiatives, the number of legal calls could be increased further,” Mir Nasir Hossain, president of the Telecommunication Infrastructure Operators of Bangladesh (TOIB) told the Dhaka Tribune. He is also managing director of Mir Telecom, an IGW operator.
According to the telecom sources, the number of out-bound international calls was 17.29 crore minutes from January to June.
