Teletalk again faces allegation of call tampering

For the second time in a month, the top three mobile operators have jointly filed a complaint with the telecom regulator, alleging that state-owned Teletalk tampered with international calls, an illegal activity that caused them revenue losses.

When an international call is received, the local operator gets Tk 0.27 for each minute from the caller's end. For a local call, it gets Tk 0.18 per minute.

Grameenphone, Robi and Banglalink allege that Teletalk has been hijacking the international calls meant for them from the gateway and placing them to the receivers' end as a local call.

In so doing, they are receiving Tk 0.18 per minute for the calls instead of Tk 0.27, and Teletalk is pocketing the difference in part or in entirety.

Given no resolution to the issue after their first letter to Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission last month, the three operators sent in a follow-up letter on July 12.

This is not a new complaint, but the telecom division has taken this allegation seriously and will open a probe shortly, said Md Faizur Rahman Chowdhury, secretary of the division.

Between June 1 and June 30, Teletalk's call minutes to Grameenphone increased 46.1 percent, to Banglalink 40.62 percent and Robi 34.67 percent, according to the recent letter.

Furthermore, the calls from Teletalk were of abnormal duration, which supports the three operators' complaint, they said.

In case of local calls, the duration is less than two minutes on average, but all three operators found that calls from Teletalk lasted more than three and a half minutes.

The average duration of calls from Teletalk to Banglalink was 3.35 minutes, to Grameenphone 4.16 minutes and Robi 4.41 minutes, according to the letter.

“When people call from abroad, it is mainly to their relatives; so the calls are mostly of high duration. But when people make local calls, sometimes it is only for a few seconds,” a senior executive of one of the three aggrieved operators told The Daily Star.

Subsequently, they urged the regulator to bar the SIMs that are connected with illegal termination of international calls. At present, about 12 crore minutes of international calls come into the country every day on average, which brings in at least a million dollars in revenue for the operators.