High cost for poor quality telecom service

BANGLADESH Telecommunication Regulatory Commission in a recent report said that quality of service of state-owned mobile phone operator Teletalk was the lowest in four divisions compared with that of other operators. Among the three private mobile phone operators Grameenphone, Robi and Banglalink, the subscribers of Robi witnessed the lowest service quality based on the quality of service benchmarks of BTRC.
BTRC prepared four separate reports over quality of service in Barishal, Khulna, Rangpur and Rajshahi based on approximately 5,650 samples collected from the areas. The BTRC reports showed that none of the operators managed to comply with the minimum 4G speed. However, the officials of mobile phone operators blamed high prices of spectrum and lack of optical fibre connectivity for the deviation in service quality.
It’s clear that, Teletalk could not maintain five QoS benchmarks; 3G download speed, call setup time, call drop rate and call setup success rate along with failing to launch 4G service in any of the divisions under survey. The Teletalk authority has blamed fund crisis for the failure in expanding its service.
Though the BTRA and telecom operators are trading blame games each other; we find it that none of the mobile operators can maintain the required 4G speed of 7 megabytes per second in any of the four divisions. In fact, the 4G service outside Dhaka including Chattogram and Barishal is also not satisfactory. What is miserable is that, subscribers in Dhaka also face severe trouble in getting 4G service in many areas almost often.
There is another big problem that is call drop. Country gets about 15.7 crore active mobile connections as of December. But call drop is so frequent that people have to bear additional cost to make their desired phone calls. Currently, the situation has deteriorated by the arrangement of call transfers from carrier to carrier through independent gateways or interconnection exchanges.
We do urge the BTRC to make mobile phone use easy and comfortable with offering lowest possible price. It seems, Bangladeshi mobile users have to pay highest price for getting a low quality service.