Three companies have showed interest in testing the service quality of mobile phone operators across Bangladesh after the telecom regulator last month sought to appoint firms to test the services of the carriers.
The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) last month issued an expression of interest (EoI) for the interested parties to conduct test drives on mobile phone operators’ services countrywide, including the metropolis and cities.
The qualified firm will conduct drive tests for measuring and assessing the coverage, capacity and quality of services (QoS) of cellular mobile networks throughout the country.
The tentative timeline for the test drive to measure QoS is likely to be set sometime between May and October.
The interested firm/lead firm must have minimum two years' experience of measuring QoS of mobile operators through drive test, according to the eligibility criteria of the BTRC.
“We received expressions of interest from only three companies within the deadline that ended on Sunday. The number of participation was lower than expected,” a senior BTRC official told Dhaka Tribune on Monday.
This is the first time the BTRC is going to outsource the QoS test drive service as earlier the QoS tests were conducted in metropolises by the commission.
Last year, the telecom regulator conducted test drives in Dhaka and Barisal divisions to assess the quality of 4G services provided by mobile operators as per the BTRC benchmark of 7 MBps download speed.
All the four mobile phone operators, however, were found to be providing 4G internet services below the BTRC benchmark.
