News Desk :
Spectrum auction for mobile services in Bangladesh began on Monday.
Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission organised the auction at the Hotel InterContinental Dhaka, where all the four mobile phone operations Grameephone, Robi, Banglalink and Teletalk participated.
Till filing this report, a total of 64 rounds of the auction took place for the last 5MHz of spectrum in the 21MHz spectrum band but none of the two operators is yet to backtrack from getting the spectrum.
The auction from the spectrum started with the floor price of $27 million per MHz of spectrum for 15 years.
Banglalink discontinued in the bidding of the last 5MHz of the spectrum from the very first round of bidding.
Then, Teletalk discontinued the bidding from the 15th round of bidding.
Later, leading mobile phone operator GP and the second-largest telecom operator Robi engaged in bidding and continued to bid with the price of each megahertz spectrum reaching $43 million per megahertz spectrum for 15 years at the 65th round of bidding.
The telecom regulator has earned Tk 1,945 crore against the sales of 7.4 MHz of spectrum from 1800MHz.
All the spectrums in the band were sold at a floor price of $31 million per megahertz for 15 years.
In the 2100 MHz spectrum band, three out of four blocks totalling 15 MHz of spectrum in the 2100 MHz band were sold at $29 million.
From the 1800 MHz spectrum band, Banglalink purchased the highest 4.4 MHz of spectrum, Robi bought 2.6 MHz of spectrum and Grameephone took 0.4 MHz of spectrum.
With the acquisition of new spectrum, GP, Robi and Banglalink spectrum possession in 1800 MHz spectrum band increased to 20 MHz of spectrum each.
The state-owned telecom operator Teletalk has 10MHz of spectrum in the 1800 MHz spectrum band.
Teletalk participated in the auction for the 2100MHz spectrum band but failed to purchase any spectrum in the auction.
BTRC commissioner AKM Shahiduzzaman presided over the auction, where posts and telecommunications minister Mustafa Jabbar, BTRC chairman Shayam Shunder Sikder were present, among others.
BTRC director generals Nasim Parvez and Md Shahidul Alam conducted the spectrum auction.
