Land-mobile Call
BTTB to charge per minute
Monjur Mahmud
Calling from Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) land phones to mobile phones will get very costly soon, as the state-owned operator is going to charge the calls per minute instead of the present 5-minute peak and 8- to 10-minute off-peak chunks.Presently, a caller from a BTTB phone to a cellphone can talk for five minutes for Tk 1.5 in the 8am-11pm peak time and for eight to 10 minutes in the 11pm-8am off-peak time. But when the new BTTB tariff regime comes into effect, applicable everywhere in the country, the caller will have to pay Tk 1.5 for every minute of the talk time, sources said. The finance ministry on Thursday approved the BTTB proposal submitted to it on December 22 to increase the call tariff. According to the proposed call tariff, there will be no difference in charge between peak and off-peak times. On the other hand, an inter-district caller will not have to pay the present nation-wide dialling (NWD) charges. The BTTB does not have any minute-based revenue-sharing agreement with the private mobile phone operators, but it has one with the state-run operator Teletalk. A process is now on to ink such deals with the private cellphone operators after the BTTB enforces the new tariff regime, sources said. BTTB officials said users across the world pay more for land phone-to-mobile phone calls than the land phone-to-land phone ones, but the BTTB has not gone for this typical charging so far.
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