Daffodil International University
Faculties and Departments => Faculty Sections => Topic started by: Showrav.Yazdani on September 30, 2015, 07:40:58 PM
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Grameenphone wants to bring all its customers under a single insurance scheme covering health, death, accidents and hospital support.
The largest mobile phone operator in Bangladesh is also planning to get tied up with the Bangladesh government’s e-education services, said a high official of Telenor, the Norway-based parent company of the operator.gphead
“We have signed two partnership deals with a global and a local insurance company [in Bangladesh],” Head of Telenor Asia Sigve Brekke said in an interview on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
“If a customer gives certain amount of money, he or she will be provided insurance facilities,” he said.
The four-day long Mobile World Congress, the biggest annual gathering of the mobile industry, concluded yesterday.
“We are having discussions with the Bangladesh government about how educational services can be improved so that one can get access to schools, professors and universities easily,” said Brekke, who is also the chairman of the GP board of directors.
“We think this will be a big opportunity for us in terms of providing information such as crop prices and harvest to farmers across Asia,” he said.
GP wants its customers to have banking relations and transactional services for transferring and lending money and pay bills through their mobile phones. “But that does not mean we are competing with the banks. We will not deal with the existing banking customers. We will try to bring only those who do not have banking relations under our scheme.”
For that, he said, they would look to have their own banking licence, similar to what exist in neighboring India, Pakistan and Myanmar. “If we cannot have that, then we will tie up with the banks for ensuring these services.”
Regarding the upcoming spectrum auction in Bangladesh, Brekke said they are looking for a neutral bandwidth bidding to acquire a wider spectrum so that they can be ready to embrace faster data services such as the 4G.
GP is the highest revenue-generating concern of the Norway-based Telenor Group.
“We are strongly arguing that we need to use a lot of spectrum for 3G, 4G and later for 5G. We cannot get stuck…Unfortunately, the regulators in Bangladesh said they will not go for neutral spectrum technology,” he said.
Operators who provide voice services and have less than 20 MHz spectrum in the GSM bands – 900 MHz and 1,800 MHz – are eligible to participate in the auction due next month.
There are concerns that GP, the only operator in Bangladesh to have more than 20 MHz in those bands, may not be allowed bid for the 1,800 MHz spectrum.
GP, who control 43% of the market share, will be able to take part in the bidding if the entire 10.6 MHz spectrum remains unsold after the auction.
Terming the condition discriminatory, Brekke said: “In some cases we are using the spectrum for 2G, in some cases for 3G. But you should have 4G in Bangladesh and we need a lot of bandwidth to go for the technology.”
He said the telecom policy in Bangladesh is 16 years old and it does not draw out on the internet. So a new policy is needed in order to have more investment in future, particularly because the government has been talking about “Digital Bangladesh.”
GP currently has 52 million active subscribers, out of which 20% use internet on a daily basis. The company wants to raise the mobile internet penetration to 80% by the end of 2017.
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Good plan indeed
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Really good idea...