BTRC move underway to wipe out illegal VoIP

The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) will soon form a technical audit team aiming to detect revenue dodging by mobile phone operators and illegal Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) business, according to officials at the telecom regulator, reports UNB.
They said the technical audit team will work to find out the real amount of call termination and monitor weather all the telecom operators and VoIP businessmen are skirting around the rules.
This audit team, which will be formed in line with the recommendation made by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Posts and Telecommunications Ministry, will recruit a big technical audit firm to keep watch on the illegal call termination and the revenue tricks, said BTRC secretary M Sarwar Alam.
According to sources at the ministry, the audit firm will keep watch whether telecom operators are giving right information about the incoming and outgoing international calls to the government.
Besides, the BTRC has taken some other initiatives, including special drives, to wipe out illegal VoIP business.
Legal incoming calls routed to the country through International Gateway (IGW) have almost doubled over the last six months following  special drives against the illegal VoIP business, the BTRC sources said.
But the rate of illegal call termination - which means illegal routing of phone calls from one company to another - is still very high in the country, depriving the government of huge revenue, they observed.
Talking to the news agency, BTRC secretary M Sarwar Alam claimed the amount of legal incoming calls has increased to 100-110 million minutes on an average every day, which was only 54.6 million in June, 2014 and 46.5 million in 2013 following the special drive against the illegal VoIP business.
The BTRC, in association with different law enforcement agencies, has so far conducted 35 raids against those involved in the illegal VoIP business and seized huge illegal channel boxes, gateway, servers, unregistered SIM cards, computers and many other instruments from the illegal VoIP operators, he added.
The BTRC secretary also noted that they are looking forward to increasing the raids against illegal VoIP businessmen in the current year.
Talking about the widespread VoIP business in the county, Kazi Firoz Rashid, a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee, alleged that some influential people are involved in this illegal business.
"We can arrest the illegal VoIP businessmen and punish them. However, those who have been arrested are not enough. The government is losing huge revenue in this field alone," he said.
He urged the government to take tougher steps to stop the illegal business.
The BTRC has already created a Call Detail Terminal Record (CDTR) with a view to getting the exact account of international calls, and gauge call volume of telecom operators.
It has awarded the International Gateway (IGW) licence to 29 operators while 26 and 37 organisations got the Inter Connection Exchange (ICX) licence and the International Internet Gateway (IIG) licence respectively.
The government gets Tk 1.5 per minute for international incoming calls from the 23 IGW registered operators.
Some BTRC officials, preferring anonymity, alleged that some influential people are operating illegal VoIP business by setting up various machines in residences in some important areas.
But they are managing to shift the machines to another place before the law enforcers are managing to reach the areas, they added.