Directive soon to compensate subscribers for call drops: Govt

The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) will soon tell mobile phone operators to compensate their subscribers for dropped calls.

“The BTRC will be told to monitor the talk time dropped and reimbursed,” said State Minister for Posts and Telecommunications Tarana Halim.

Briefing the media on her ministry’s achievements during the past two years, she said subscribers will be compensated for dropped calls from as early as this year.

Last August, at a meeting with mobile phone operator CEOs, the government had set them a two-month deadline to solve the problem.

Halim had then instructed the BTRC to weigh the options of paying compensation or restoring talk time for dropped calls.

India’s telecoms regulator recently ordered the country’s mobile phone operators to pay subscribers Rs 1 as compensation for each dropped call.

Former BTRC chief Sunil Kanti Bose had said the matter would be resolved once mobile number portability (MNP) was introduced.

Halim told the media on Wednesday that the mobile phone operators had been told to improve the service.

“Directives have been given on matters like call drops, network quality, and copyright violation,” she said.

BTRC figures show the number of mobile phone subscribers in Bangladesh was over 133.10 million at the end of November 2014.