Bangladesh mobile phone subscribers fall to 120 mn

Mobile phone subscribers in Bangladesh declined to nearly 120 million in August -- down about 9 million from the previous month, a report said on Monday.

Statistics of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) showed that the number of subscribers of the mobile operators -- Grameenphone, Banglalink, Robi Axiata, Airtel, Citycell and Teletalk -- at the end of August this year stood at 54.507 million, 28.977 million, 23.263 million, 7.943 million, 0.668 million and 4.437 million, respectively.

The BTRC data showed that the number of subscribers of the six operators in the country reached 128.939 million in July this year, Xinhua news agency reported.

Statistics showed that the number of users have been falling since April this year.

According to a BTRC official, all the six operators have been losing customers since the government mandated fingerprint re-registration for all SIMs.

The operators have already seen a massive dip in their active users after they started registering the biometric data of the users, he said.

The Bangladesh government in April extended the deadline for biometric re-registration of mobile phone SIM cards by a month that ended on May 31.

Bangladesh launched biometric verification for SIM registration in December last year.

The total number of mobile phone subscribers in the country reached about 133.72 million at the end of December last year with addition of 13.37 million new users last year.

--IANS

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