Nowadays Asia is the focus market for the service providers and the vendors. One survey carried out by the researchers from the Russian School of Economics, the London Business School, various colleges of Cambridge University and the Anglo-Russian telecoms investment group Altimo reported Bangladesh as the number one telecom opportunity market for the manufacturers, service providers and the vendors.
According to the report the Top Five countries for telecoms investment are Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia and Russia. The full report can be viewed from http://www.telecomtv.com/news.asp?cd_id=7926&url=news.asp?cd_id=7926.
Now recently there are six (6) mobile operators are there in Bangladesh market which made the market huge competitive for the telcos. Among these six, five are providing GSM and one is CDMA infrastructure. The mobile web started its journey here, but not in a large scale. The subscribers yet think data service as a costly and luxurious service. Here in Bangladesh two basic subscriber class are there: Post-Paid and Pre-Paid. For post-paid a monthly line rent fee is to be provided by the subscribers. Pre-paid is real time charging base and is obviously allocating the largest percentage of subscribers.
Based on the general data service tariff plan there are two packages are provided by almost all the operators.
Package 1: Pay per use
This is the volume based charging per KB (kilobyte). General tariff resides between BDT 0.015/KB and BDT 0.02/KB [ BDT 70 = USD 1].
Package 2: Unlimited Use
The subscribers pay a flat fee (generally between BDT 600 to BDT 1500 per month) to enjoy the unlimited browsing facility. As it is a big amount of money for the Bangladesh market except one operator all others are providing this package available only for the post-paid subscriber base. The user class of this package are generally the corporates.
Package 3: Monthly data plan
Recently CityCell, one of the operators, having CDMA network, is providing data service package based on segmented download size with the brand name “myCityCell Zoom”. They are providing data services based on monthly download usage of 100MB, 300MB and 3GB. They are also providing pay per use data service. Also CityCell set the milestone providing the data card with the package.
Services:
As the data service is thought of as the costly service by the subscribers so operators are yet found to be lazy taking initiatives on data service. Among the six (6) operators only two are found to be leading the data service market in Bangladesh. They are : AKTEL and GrameenPhone. AKTEL having almost 6.5 million subscriber base. GrameenPhone is currently leading the market of subscriber base of almost 10.5 million.
Here the subscribers are enjoying and experiencing the mobile web through several services like: WAP browsing, MMS Peer to Peer, MMS Peer to Email, download service (like game, wallpaper, ringtone etc..).
Content services are generally provided by AKTEL and GrameenPhone. Four among the six operators are providing MMS peer-2-peer service and MMS peer-2-email service is provided by three operators. In AKTEL network the CPs are maintaining their own content portal and in GrameenPhone the contents are hosted by their Content Management Platform.
International MMS service is provided currently only by GrameenPhone which costs BDT 15.00/ MMS. Also GrameenPhone is providing IMS based solution service.
Bangladesh and dotmobi introduction:
As the mobile web did not get the popularity yet in the mass market so the question of mobile web experience did not yet huge buzz here. It will take some more time to get the problems be experienced and be focused. But most of the operators are using Content Management Systems which is actually taking care of the nearest best user experience. But in the dotmobi ready toll almost all the operators as well as the content providers are found to score 3 (Fair) which should be increased I think.
Conclusion Notes: Bangladesh and Data service prospects
So far comparing with voice service revenue data revenue is very much lower and the subscribers as well as the operators are not so much concerned about the data services. So there is very less promotion in this sector. But truly speaking there are huge potential in this sector. Just the need is to let the people understand that it is a general service and it is not a service of the rich guys.
A subscriber having a data service (GPRS/EDGE/CDMA 2000) enabled and having a data service featured (WAP/MMS/Streaming enabled) handset can be thought of as the Eligible Data User for that network. It is seen that approximately 28% of the subscriber base are generally carrying data service enabled handsets. So far the total subscriber base including all the six operators in Bangladesh is 25 million. So Eligible Data users are almost around 7 million which is quite big I think.
Bangladesh population is currently more than 150 million. Among this 150 million only around 25 million are mobile users which is only 16% of the total population. Mobile web is going to be the next killer service in this market as voice tariff race is going to be a stable stage. So the next topic to be played by the operators are obviously is the data service.
The new handsets are coming to the market are at least WAP enabled nowadays and day by day old handsets will be vanished from the market which will obviously increase the Eligible Data user base. So scope will increase day by day.
