Grameenphone (GP), amid no competition, has secured 10 megahertz (MHz) of spectrum in the 700MHz band as the first mobile telecom operator in the country.
The allocation at the base price of Tk237 crore per MHz was approved at a meeting of the Spectrum Auction Committee and the Spectrum Management Committee of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) on Wednesday, confirmed its officials.
GP emerged as the sole bidder in the auction after Robi Axiata withdrew its application and Banglalink chose not to participate, citing concerns over commercial viability at the prevailing reserve price.
Under the auction guidelines issued by BTRC, a single bidder was eligible to acquire up to 10MHz of spectrum.
Industry people say the 700MHz band is particularly important for Grameenphone, which serves the country’s largest mobile customer base but lags competitors in per-user spectrum holdings.
Low-band spectrum is widely regarded as essential for easing network congestion, expanding rural coverage and improving indoor signal penetration while lowering the cost per bit for large-scale networks.
GP Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Tanveer Mohammad said GP has received an acknowledgment letter from BTRC confirming the operator’s eligibility to acquire the 700MHz spectrum upon completion of all applicable regulatory requirements.
He said the allocation would allow the operator to enhance coverage in underserved and indoor environments, improve network efficiency and resilience and deliver secure digital services to its more than 85.6 million customers.
Rival operators Robi Axiata and Banglalink in their letters to BTRC earlier, maintained that the 700MHz spectrum remains commercially unviable at the current base price and warned that allocating the low-band spectrum to a single dominant operator could create competitive imbalance in the mobile telecom market.
