Sri Lanka to impose a new tax on international calls
Sri Lanka has imposed new taxes on telecommunication including a 20% tax removing some of the existing ones, a regulatory license fee equal to 2% of revenues and has also imposed a new tax on international calls.
The government has removed valued added tax from telecoms and made it an exempt industry, further complicating the regime.
According to the government speech, imports of high tech telecom equipment will not be charged VAT. The government has also imposed a 2 rupee a minute new tax on outgoing calls. The 20% fee replaces VAT, a nation building levy, a mobile subscriber levy and an economic service charge.
According to President Mahinda Rajapaksa, from July 2011 the minimum call rate of 2.0 rupees a minute will be reduced to 1.50. He had asked the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission to regulate the broadband costs in order to increase broadband penetration.
Orange Jordan to launch first 3G network
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: The 3G network launched by Orange Jordan is expected to cover some two million Jordanians by the end of the summer. The rolling out of W-CDMA network will be conducted in three phases.
In the first phase roll out, west Amman, Irbid and Zarqa will be covered. The second phase will be carried out in April and it will be expanded over the entire capital and Aqaba while in the third phase due by summer 2010, most urban locations will be covered. After the roll out, 70% of populated areas will receive the service, equivalent to around two million people.
JOD50 million (USD70 million) license for the introduction of 3G services had been granted to Orange by the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) in August last year. A year of exclusivity will be enjoyed by the company after which, on agreeing to the same license conditions, other mobile operators will be allowed to introduce 3G services.
Bangladesh operator to be bought by Indian telco Bharti Airtel
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Bangladesh’s fourth largest mobile phone operator Warid is set to sell 70% stake in its company from its Abu Dhabi-based owners and regulators to one of the India’s leading telco Bharti Airtel. An approval
from the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission for the sale has been sought by the Dhabi Group, which fully owns Warid.
With the latest move, Airtel becomes the largest foreign operator to make inroads into Bangladesh mobile phone market. According to BTRC chairman Zia Ahmed, Bharti initially intended to invest 300 million dollars.
Warid was launched in 2007 and had three million subscribers at the end of October. The subscription is predicted to cross 100 million marks by 2015 by the industry experts.
Last year Japan’s NTT DoCoMo Inc bought 30 percent stake in operator AKTEL. Earlier, in the year 2004, Egyptian Orascom took over Sheba and in 2005 Singapore based Singtel bought 45 percent stake in Bangladesh Telecom.
Bangladesh among Asia’s top 10 mobile markets
has emerged as one of
‘s top 10 mobile phone markets in terms of adding net subscribers, according to the chairman of GSM Asia Pacific, a regional forum of the Generalised System of Multiple Access (GSMA) mobile operators, reports BDNEWS.
GSM Asia Pacific Chairman Mehboob Chowdhury warned that though Bangladesh the 8th top mobile market in Asia, ahead of Thailand and Philippines, it would be impossible to retain that position unless the government immediately purged the industry of the ‘counterproductive’ policies and shook up the telecom regulators.
Besides, the country has added 8.945 million GSMA mobile users in a single year — from July 2005 to June 2006, according to the latest figure of GSMA association.
In an exclusive interview with the news agency, Chowdhury disclosed thatnow ranked eighth among the top 10 Asian mobile markets in terms of adding net subscribers during January to March, 2006.
Citing the data of Informal Telecoms and Media, a London-based research firm, he saidhas had 1.265 million new users during the first quarter of 2006. The figure is slightly lower than the net addition ofandcombined, and marginally lower than seventh-ranked’s first quarter intake.
, fifth on the list, has added more than two million mobile subscribers during this period, but its total clientele was smaller than whathad in the first quarter of 2006.
GSM Asia Pacific chairman credited the cellular mobile operators with this achievement while being critical of the government’s ‘pounding the industry with disruptive policies’.
“When the operators made new connections affordable and started slashing the call charges; the government came up with this disastrous tax last year. It was a bolt from the blue (for the operators) that slowed down the market for a while.”
The new 8.945 million GSMA mobile users that have putin the global map is the result of the operators’ continuous effort, Chowdhury pointed out.
The new customers belong to the middle-to-lower income bracket that have been perennially ‘harassed’ by the state-run Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) in trying to get regular phone connections.
“The private sector has salvaged them and that’s why the subscribers identity module (SIM) tax is grossly an anti-people move, which the government should scrap ahead of the election.”
“The market could have added at least four million more customers, there could have been an euphoric outbreak of tariff war and the government could have earned more revenue from the boom (if the tax were not there)”, Chowdhury continued.
Liking the slapping of SIM tax to killing the golden goose, he said this testifies to ‘the government’s inability’ to understand the fundamentals of this business.
He refused to give the government much credit for slashing the tax from mobile phone handsets.
“The amount of tax the government has withdrawn from handset is the exact amount it has simultaneously imposed as SIM tax and the burden remains unchanged for new customers”, pointed out Chowdhury, who was GrameenPhone’s marketing director for five years and Banglalink’s Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) for nearly a year until resigning recently .
He said more than two billion people use GSM mobile phones worldwide, accounting for an 82.4 per cent penetration. Asia Pacific region alone boasts 757.13 million GSMA mobile users and the figure is fast growing.
“Every second 18 new GSM users are being added worldwide, which means more than 1,000 customers in every minute and over 1.5 million new GSMA mobile users per day.”
Chowdhury said the next billion GSMA customers are mostly coming from,,,,,,and other similar economies.
He recognised continuous investment as the key component for sustainable mobile phone market growth in.
Effective telecommunications regulatory regime is, however, the precondition to wooing new investments and boosting competition.
“The Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has become merely an extension of the taxation department and that is certainly not the case with,or”, he said.
“[And] That’s why the telecom markets of these South Asian countries have been consistently thriving.”
More than 85 per cent of the mobile phone users have no access to the largest fixed telephone operator BTTB, the state-owned monopoly that has little relevance in today’s mobile market, Chowdhury regretted.
“The mobile operators will not even bother to talk to the BTTB the moment the government ends its monopoly on the international voice gateway”, he predicted.
The BTTB’s denial to provide interconnection is a clear breach of the telecoms law and resents the regulator’s ‘unfair concession’ for BTTB on this issue, the former Banglalink CCO said.
The government is ‘draining’ public funds on ‘impractical projects’ like VoIP platforms, he complained.
“Besides, ignoring the country’s fundamental telecommunication needs, the government is going to waste hundreds of millions of dollars in highly debatable and grossly unproductive supplier’s credit telecoms schemes”, he added.
The government has to deploy reliable nationwide telecoms infrastructure and then ensure the private sector’s equitable access to that resource, Chowdhury suggested.
“This is what Pakistan, India and many other fast developing countries are doing and Bangladesh should waste no time to reinvent the wheel”, he remarked.
Source- http://www.financialexpress-bd.com
Technorati : BTRC, Bangladesh, GSM, Mobile
Ice Rocket : BTRC, Bangladesh, GSM, Mobile
