Bangladesh ranks low in South Asia mobile use

Bangladesh's mobile penetration rate stood at 28 percent in 2008
lagging behind war-ravaged Afghanistan's 29 percent in South Asia,
according to a regional report. "Of course, the fact that Afghanistan
is ahead of Bangladesh in mobile penetration should cause all sorts
of palpitations in government offices in Dhaka," said the report
tilted 'Telecom Access Rankings in South Asia'. LIRNEasia posted the
report Saturday on its website based on statistics of UN
International Telecommunication Union. LIRNEasia is an ICT policy and
regulation think tank active across Asia Pacific. Bangladesh was one
of the earliest in South Asia to adopt mobile and is one of the most
densely populated countries in the world. "How the country was
overtaken by Afghanistan, a war-torn country with difficult terrain,
should cause serious re-examination of policies such as the Tk 800
SIM (subscriber identity module) tax," the report said. Pakistan's
surge to overtake Sri Lanka has petered out, leaving the Maldives
(143 active SIMs/100 people) as the undisputed leader in mobile
connectivity and Sri Lanka second with 52 SIMs per 100 people. Both
Pakistan (50 /100) and Bhutan (37 /100) are ahead of India (29 /100)
in mobile. "This shows that India cannot afford to let up the pace
of 10 million connections a month for some time. If it does, it
might be overtaken by Afghanistan (29 / 100) and even Bangladesh (28
/100) ," the report said. On the fixed side, assisted by CDMA (code
division multiple access) phones that are counted as fixed, Sri Lanka
is the leader (17 connections per 100 people), followed by the
Maldives (15 per 100). In the fixed ranking, Afghanistan is occupying
the cellar (0.37 /100 people) behind Bangladesh ( 0.84 /100) , while
Pakistan (2.5 /100) is behind Nepal (2.8 /100). India is the only
country showing negative growth (-2 percent) in fixed side over the
2003- 2008 period. From 2003 to 2008 , the number of active SIMs
has increased by over 12 times, while the number of fixed
connections has decreased marginally. The negative growth in India is
wiping out all the gains in the rest of South Asia.