Staff Reporter :
Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has said a total of 6,90,550 mobile phone subscribers have successfully been able to switch their operators without altering their existing 11 digits number using mobile number portability (MNP) service in the first one year of its launch.
The state-owned organisation said this in a report published on Monday.
According to the report, another 2,56,733 customers, at the same time, tried to switch their network but became unsuccessful due to various reasons.
Of the list, Robi gained about 84 per cent of the customers who have switched to their operators successfully.
After launching the service in early October last year, the second largest mobile operator received 4.96 lakh mobile users who were earlier using its competitors’ networks, while 1.69 lakh customers used Robi’s network.
On the success list, Grameenphone, the third largest mobile carrier of the market, is on second position. Grameenphone has received 1.26 lakh customers while lost 2.74 lakh.
The third player Banglalink received 68,528 customers from others networks while 2.89 lakh users left them.
State owned Teletalk is on the last position in both the segment. They got 4,427 customers from others and lost 8,101 from October last year to September this year.
When the National Board of Revenue withdrew the SIM tax of Tk 115 for switching operators the MNP service took off but it has been introduced in the current budget again resulting in a decline in the switching of MNP services.
Subsequently, users are now paying Tk 57 service charge for availing the MNP service and Tk 200 SIM replacement tax on that.
