edotco to invest $ 50m within next one year

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Mohammad Ali | Published: April 17, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00

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edotco Bangladesh Company Ltd which recently launched telecom tower operating firm in the country, looks to grow aggressively expanding the 'sharing of telecom infrastructure', reducing the cost of its operation.
"We are looking to grow aggressively," Andy Rolt, Managing Director of edotco Bangladesh Company Ltd, told the FE in an interview recently.
As the telecom operators are currently using separate towers, main job of edotco Bangladesh is to consolidate the towers, and then share the reduced number of infrastructure with the telecom companies, decreasing the cost of infrastructural operation with the same services.
The company hopes to be able to ensure national coverage by its infrastructure "within the next couple of years", Mr Rolt said.
"We already have infrastructure in the main population cities and also some of the rural areas of the country," he said.
edotco Bangladesh currently owns and operates in more than 6,000 BTS (base transceiver station) tower sites throughout Bangladesh and is expanding the BTS site acquiring, according to its website.
The company's major product is total passive infrastructure that includes telecom tower space, power, generator, radio equipments facilities, which are needed to receive and transmit telephony conversation.
It also has 3G equipment facilities and some additional services to provide, said the MD of edotco Bangladesh, which is a part of the Malaysia-based Axiata Group and was launched in Bangladesh as an independent business on June 1, 2013.
Mentioning benefit of the tower space sharing, Mr Rolt said that separately operation of the BTS sites by each of the cell-phone operators is "tremendously expensive and inefficient."
It means, he continued, notable amount of equipment is used unnecessarily and large amount of foreign exchange is wasted for the BTS equipments.
"What the benefit we can bring is consolidation of all the equipments", and then operate and share the reduced infrastructure with the telecom operators, dramatically decreasing the manpower and cost of operation of the BTS sites, he said.
edocto Bangladesh purchases the infrastructure including the tower from the telecom operators and looks to build it where is necessary, and then consolidates the towers, reducing its number.
Since its launching, the company already invested US$ 150 million, and has plan to spend US$ 50 million more within the next twelve months.
"We already made investment of US$ 150 million…; our plan is to spend around US$ 50 million more within the next twelve months (for the works) including expansion of the network," he said.
For providing its services, the firm has already signed agreements with the telecom operators including Grameenphone, Banglalink, Robi, Airtel and some Wimax operators, radio stations and a number of government bodies for providing its services to them.
"The company also looks to have good partnership with the telecom operators", he added.
He, however, mentioned, among others, availability of grid power as challenge for the company.
In a query, he said that as the spectrum allocated for each of the telecom operators is different; so, the telephony conversation of one operator will not 'interfere' into that of other operator, though they use the same tower to provide their services to the customers.