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Naivety Of Our Mobile Operators, Subscribers Compare With East India Company

Telecom operators in Bangladesh enjoy a particular kind of freedom in this country. They, it seems, are not necessarily require to abide rules and regulations of the country, neither the concern of their customers. This is sort of dark freedom, something immeasurable and in a certain way perpetual. Almost all the operators play nasty with government taxes, earning money in billions in this country and not caring about transparency. They don’t care about customers either. There are hidden charges, subpar services, unethical package offerings and conditions and so on.

In a meeting with CEOs of Mobile Phone Operators, Mobile Telecom Operators State Minister for Post and Telecommunications Tarana Halim expressed her deep frustration with the performance of mobile operators in solving problems with their services. The meeting, held at The Secretariat on Monday, was a display of misconducts of mobile operators. Complaints of subscribers were presented to the CEOs of mobile phone operators and asked to solve the problems like call drops, 3G service problems, high internet cost, needless deduction of money, and deduction of money even in case of unlimited packages etc within the set deadline.

Unfortunately, this is not the first meeting of its kind. This has become, sort of, a routine meeting and the list of complaints is not something new. These problems persist for ages. Making money, in any possible way, has become a very common thing for our multinational mobile operators. One complain from an anonymous customer presented in the meeting explains it all, “mobile operators of this country are behaving like East-India Company”.

Mohammad Ruhul Kader is a Dhaka-based entrepreneur and writer. He founded Future Startup, a digital publication covering the startup and technology scene in Dhaka with an ambition to transform Bangladesh through entrepreneurship and innovation. He writes about internet business, strategy, technology, and society. He is the author of Rethinking Failure. His writings have been published in almost all major national dailies in Bangladesh including DT, FE, etc. Prior to FS, he worked for a local conglomerate where he helped start a social enterprise. Ruhul is a 2022 winner of Emergent Ventures, a fellowship and grant program from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He can be reached at ruhul@futurestartup.com

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