The Bangladesh Tele-communication Regulatory Commission has decided to extend by two weeks the time for the submission of bids for international gateway licence to route overseas calls to and from Bangladesh at the request of interested parties.
Officials said the commission had fixed December 4 as the deadline, instead of November 21, to receive applications from interested parties who at a pre-bid meeting with the commission on November 4 urged an extension of the deadline.
‘We will notify the interested parties about our decision [extension of the deadline] next week,’ a commission official said.
The officials said the commission entertained the request of the parties considering their inexperience in telecoms business as the bid invitation spells out that no organisation will be eligible for the gateway licence if they hold any telecom licence from the commission.
‘The prospective bidders need more time to understand the issue as most of them need to depend on hired consultants to prepare the proposals,’ said the official.
The official, however, said the commission was unlikely to entertain other demands of the interested parties such as reducing incoming call termination rate, now $0.06, to make overseas call business profitable and competitive.
The commission sold more than 50 applications till Thursday in response to its invitation for bids of October 7.
The commission invited bids from Bangladeshi enterprises for licences to set up, maintain and operate such systems under the International Long Distance Telecommunication Services Policy 2007.
The commission will auction three licences to private-sector companies to break the monopoly of the Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board in international telephony.