BTRC lacks Quality of Judgment (QoJ)

Posted on August 19, 2009 / 4 Comments

Today (August 19, 2009) the telecoms watchdog of Bangladesh has invited responses on two public consultations. They are: QoS parameters and benchmarks for PSTN and broadband. And the deadline is August 24, 2009. That means you have only three working days to read, analyze and comment on the two documents. Interestingly both the documents are dated on August 3, 2009. The regulator has been, possibly, chewing several pencils and finally decided to post the documents in its website today. Fair enough, this is how the government outfits work. But less than a week deadline to response is very unfair. Either BTRC knows nothing about public consultation or it simply doesn’t give a damn to this process. It is noteworthy to mention that BTRC never publishes the responses of public consultations.

4 Comments

Abu Saeed Khan
August 20, 2009, 7:40 am
BTRC has extended its public consultation deadline by one week (August 31, 2009). Instead of formally announcing this extension, the regulator has just changed the date.
Kirigalpoththa
August 20, 2009, 2:27 pm
Hi Abu Saeed Khan,

What happens to handset and SIM Tax in Bangladesh? Guess there were some changes in last budget and some lengthy discussions on the same..

Rgds
K
Abu Saeed Khan
August 21, 2009, 6:45 am
@ Kirigalpoththa

The Appellate Division of Bangladesh Supreme Court will hear the case sometimes in October.
Mustafa Hussain
August 24, 2009, 11:10 pm
We appreciate the Authority’s viewpoint that the markets work best when consumers are informed about the quality of service they are buying. Therefore there is need to give the relevant information to the consumer about the QoS so that consumer makes an informed choice of service provider. The main complaints to ISPs were: Slow speeds, High Price, Frequent disconnections; slow responses to complaints
The Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has reduced the price of Internet bandwidth by about 33 percent. But this reduction has not been passed onto consumers, who are still paying roughly the same price as they did in before. The consumer also receiving less for what he’s paying – our broadband quality of service tests showed that speeds experienced by consumers were even worse than 6 months ago.
We can only hope that the lowered wholesale prices are passed down to consumers soon. The ISPs and Mobile Operators should buy enough bandwidth so that speeds experienced by consumers increase.
The subscription prices for broadband in Bangladesh are 240 times higher than in Korea, as the price of 100 KBps in Korea is US$ 0.25/month, as compared to the minimum of US$ 60/month in Bangladesh . However considering the respective purchasing powers of the two economies, this translates to 7200 times higher prices in Bangladesh .
These were the minimum 1000 TK tariffs for unlimited (non volume based), shared 128kbps usage, installation and CPE for broadband DSL in Bangladesh. The minimum monthly tariff for a 128kbps volume based broadband connection in Bangladesh is Rs . 3500 TK. The per capita GDP in Korea is US$ 17,700 as compared to US$ 652 in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh’s low position on various broadband take-up rankings is mainly a reflection of the delay in the launch of competitive broadband services in Bangladesh compared to most other countries. It does not suggest that there is a lack of demand for broadband services by users. The lack of competition between broadband service providers coupled with the higher bandwidth tariffs charged by Bangladesh, weakened the initial rollout of broadband in Bangladesh.

Contention ratio for home and small business segment could be set as per the international standards. Broadband penetration in Bangladesh and the pricing of services is not up to the global benchmarks. Contention ratio enforced in such circumstances should be reviewed from time to time across ISPs.

We believe QOS of Broadband Internet Service is not properly addressed in the consultation paper. Unfortunately the main issues Slow speeds, High Price, frequent disconnections are not even mentioned in the paper.

We sincerely believe that the BTRC would consider our comments in the perspective and expect forward-looking recommendations on subject matter.