End users of internet will not gain from bandwidth price cut

There will be no cut in the use of internet costs for the end users because of the conditional drop in bandwidth price in Bangladesh, International Internet Gateway (IIG) operators and Internet Service Providers (ISP) think. Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Limited (BSCCL) has announced the price cut, saying the internet gateways will get 1MBPS bandwidth at Tk625 from this month (September 1). Earlier, they had to pay Tk1,068 for 1MBPS bandwidth, 41 per cent more than the newly-fixed rate. The 41 per cent reduced price is applicable for 10GBPS (gigabyte per second) slab in Dhaka, Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar initially. The IIG operators say only one or two among the 37 of them buy from the 10GBPS slab from the BSCCL. IIG operator Fiber@Home Strategy Officer Sumon Ahmed Sabir said on Tuesday the others buy 2.5-5GBPS from BSCCL and the rest bandwidth from International Terrestrial Cable (ITC) operators. Sabir said he did not think any IIG operator will agree to buy from the 10GBPS slab, which means the reduction in price will not reach the users. ISP Association Bangladesh (ISPAB) Secretary Emdadul Haque agreed. He said the price cut was nothing but mere ‘eyewash by the BSCCL’.
“No IIG alone buys 10GBPS bandwidth from the BSCCL. So we’ll not be able to provide the benefit at user-level,” Haque said. According to him, the BSCCL reduced the price of 1GBPS to Tk 900. “But we are buying at lesser rate from ITC for a long time.”
Besides the BSCCL, Bangladesh is connected to six alternative ITCs that sell bandwidth to the IIG operators.
According to regulator BTRC, the ISP and Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) had around 1.3 million users until the end of July, reports bdnews24.com.
- biplab