In January of this year, Bangladesh added over 2 million new mobile phone subscribers. This poor nation of 140 million now has 34.4 million subscribers. The Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission said 2007 saw growth of 58% due mainly to price cuts
made by the country’s six competing cell phone carriers.
A number of market surveys predict that the number of mobile phone users will increase to around 50 million by the end of 2009.
Bangladesh’s top mobile provider, Grameenphone, increased its subscription base to 16.9 million from 16.7 million at the end of 2007. Aktel ended January with 7.3 million up from 6.4 million. Warid Telecom added 220,000 subscribers in January, increasing its base to 2.4 million. The only CDMA carrier CityCell increased to 1.5 million users up from 1.41 million in 2007. State owned Teletalk reached the 1 million mark in January, up from 850,000 at the end of 2007.