Grameenphone yesterday said it would go to courts to bring the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission to table for an arbitration in order to settle the regulator’s claim of Tk 12,580 crore dues.

The telecom regulator yesterday scrapped licences of 48 internet service providers after they failed to pay renewal fees in time.

The telecom regulator will not give any kind of approval to Grameenphone and Robi to roll out new package or service or import network equipment as it looks to pile pressure on the operators to clear their dues, according to a letter issued yesterday.

The telecom regulator scraps licences of 48 internet service providers after they failed to pay their renewal fees in time.

Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission may withdraw the bandwidth capped on Grameenphone and Robi for the relief of crores of internet users of the two leading mobile phone operators.

Grameenphone raked in Tk 3,603.82 crore in revenue in the April-June period this year, the highest in a single quarter, driven by growth in voice and data usage due to improved network.

The telecom regulator has refrained from receiving mobile phone operators’ various payments for the April-June quarter after the latter declined to include the associated value-added tax in the sum.

Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) says there is no scope for arbitration under the existing law over its action taken against the two major telecom operators.

The telecom regulator has partially blocked the bandwidth capacity of Grameenphone and Robi from last evening for non-payment of dues detected in audits -- a drastic step that ultimately hurts the 12.25 crore subscribers of the two operators.

Schenker (Asia Pacific) Pte, a subsidiary of DB Schenker, the transport and logistics division of Deutsche Bahn Group, has expanded its presence in the Indian subcontinent with the launch of a new subsidiary in Bangladesh.

Mobile users have already started to feel the heat of the proposed budget for fiscal 2019-20, which proposed doubling the supplementary duty and higher turnover tax on operators, said experts and related bodies yesterday.

Hackers have broken into the systems of more than a dozen global telecoms companies and taken large amounts of personal and corporate data, researchers from a cyber security company says, identifying links to previous Chinese cyber-espionage campaigns.

The duty proposed on smartphones will push up illegal imports and cause big revenue losses for the government, industry stakeholders say.

The telecom regulator directs all the mobile phone operators in the country to reduce the charges of each local SMS to Tk 0.25 that are written in Bengali alphabet, aiming to promote the mother language.

Import of smartphones will be costlier as supplementary duty is proposed to be raised by two and half times to 25 per cent from its existing 10 per cent in the proposed budget.

Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) is going to use social media platforms such as Facebook and Viber, among others, to receive complaints from the customers, says its chairman at a public hearing.

Robi is planning to raise Tk 400 crore from the local market by issuing a Shariah-based security bond with the face value of each certificate being Tk 1 lakh.

Crores of mobile phone users can brace themselves for poorer network quality as the carriers and tower licence holders have failed to get on the same page seven months into the new arrangement.

Once a much-hyped breakthrough for internet communication, WiMax is now on its last legs in Bangladesh after two out of the three operators that deployed the wireless broadband technology turned off their switches.

A ban on buying telecoms equipment from Chinese firms would add about 55 billion euros ($62 billion) to the cost of 5G networks in Europe and delay the technology by about 18 months, according to an industry analysis seen by Reuters.