The number of mobile subscribers increased by 8.94 lakh in February as all four mobile operators managed to add customers.
As per the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission data, the number of total mobile phone subscribers increased to 15.84 crore at the end of February from 15.75 crore in January this year.
Leading mobile phone operator Grameenphone attained highest 4.02 lakh subscribers, taking its subscriber-base to 7.35 crore from 7.31 crore.
Third largest operator Banglalink’s subscriber- base increased by 3.32 lakh to 3.4 crore at the end of February from 3.37 crore.
The second largest operator Robi managed to add 1.25 lakh subscribers, taking its total number of subscribers to 4.70 crore from 4.69 crore.
The lone state-owned entity Teletalk’s number of subscribers increased by 36,000 in February to 39.21 lakh from 38.85 lakh a month ago.
Apart from the mobile phone subscribers, the number of active internet users in the country increased by 6.4 lakh in February to 9.21 crore from 9.14 crore a month ago.
Internet subscribers of mobile phone operators, which provides internet to 93.7 per cent subscribers’ in the country, rose by 6.38 lakh to 8.63 crore from 8.56 crore.
Growth of broadband internet subscribers has been remaining almost halted for almost once year.
In February, broadband internet service providers and PSTN operators managed to add only 1,000 subscribers. Subscriber base of the entities stood at 57.31 lakh from 57.3 lakh after losing 5,000 subscribers in January this year.
From October to December 2018, broadband internet subscribers failed to add any customers under their service.
During the entire 2018, broadband service providers and PSTN operator could bring in only 3.91 lakh customers under their service after the addition of 15.23 lakh in the year 2017.
As per the latest available data, 1,478 entities are operating ISP business across the country as of Sunday while the figure was 499 in 2017.
Internet service providers, however, differed with the BTRC statistics adding that it might be the new definition of broadband where connections with 5 megabits per second or above speed was named as broadband internet.
As a large number of the subscribers use less than 5Mbps connections, they might have been excluded from BTRC’s calculation, they said.
Source: http://www.newagebd.net/article/68293/9-lakh-mobile-subscribers-added-in-february