Four companies get notification of award for mobile phone tower sharing licence

Telecom regulator BTRC has given the notification of award to four entities for mobile phone tower-sharing licence.

The four entities are edotco Bangladesh, TASC Summit Towers, Kirtonkhola Tower Limited, and AB Hightech Consortium.

The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission issued the notifications on Thursday, it said in a media statement.

Md Manzoorul Islam, Director of Corporate Affairs at edotco, Head of Regulatory Affairs at TASC Summit Towers Md Mustafizur Rahman, AB Hightech Managing Director Henry Hilton, and Kirtonkhola Managing Director Salman Karim received the notifications on behalf of their firms from BTRC Acting Chairman Jahurul Haque.

BTRC commissioners Md Rezaul Quader and Md Aminul Hasan, and Director MA Taleb Hossain were also present.

Eight firms applied for the licence to offer tower-sharing services in Bangladesh in June.

After evaluation, BTRC selected four of the entities in line with the ‘beauty contest’ method.

edotco Bangladesh is a spinoff of Axiata Group’s edotco Group. Greencon Tower is the local shareholder and edotco Group is the foreign shareholder of the company.

TASC Tower, a UK-based firm, and Global Holding Corporation are the foreign shareholders of TASC Summit Towers.

Kirtonkhola Tower, formerly iSON Tower, was the third company in the contest.

Confidence Tower Holdings is the local shareholder and ECP Tower Singapore is the overseas shareholder of Kirtonkhola.

ADN Telecom, AB Hightech International, ZN Enterprise, Synergy Logistic and Orange Digital are the local shareholders of AB Hightech Consortium, and China Communications Services International and Changshu Fengfan Power Equipment Company are the foreign shareholders.

At present, the country’s mobile phone operators have more than 30,000 towers, according to the BTRC.

The guidelines say tower companies will operate all the mobile phone towers.

To offer the tower-sharing services, the selected companies will have to pay Tk 250 million each in licence fee.

The annual licence renewal fee is Tk 50 million and the firms will share 5.5 percent of their revenue with the BTRC, according to related guidelines.