The state-owned mobile phone operator, Teletalk, has been identified as the main culprit behind illegal call terminations, as the operator’s SIM cards are still being used for this purpose. Moreover, millions of Teletalk SIMs are still being used without mandatory biometric verification. Meanwhile, all mobile operators except Teletalk have given guarantee letters to the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC), confirming compliance with state rules and biometric registration.
The state minister for telecommunication division Tarana Halim told the Independent: “Teletalk cannot continue this way. They should obey the government rules. They have to submit the guarantee letter like the other operators. I have told them to block all unregistered SIMs. If they do not comply, we will take tough action against them.” Teletalk Managing Director (MD) Gias Uddin Ahmed said, “Teletalk is not involved in illegal call termination. The allegation against the company is being circulated by the private telecom operators.”
When asked about the guarantee letter, he said, “We have some limitations but we are in the process to issue the letter.” Taking a step further, the Teletalk MD claimed that no one can say anything against a state-owned company and that if anyone does so, they would be acting against the state.  The BTRC claims to have detected more than 98 per cent of calls made to the country illegally over the last few days, with the help of its state-of-the-art SIM box detection tool. Most of these calls were terminated using Teletalk SIMs.
The Independent obtained a list of SIMs used for illegal call terminations between 14 and 22 August this year. Of these, 19,009 were Teletalk SIMS, whereas only 24 SIMs were of the biggest mobile phone operator Grameenphone, one of Airtel, seven of Banglalink, one of Ranks Tel, and 47 of Robi. On August 18 alone, 1,178 Teletalk SIMs were used for illegal call terminations, which increased to 4,184 SIMs on 21 August. The BTRC on August 12 seized a huge amount of illegal voice-over-internet protocol (VoIP) equipment including 6,598 SIMs, of which 5,691 were Teletalk SIMs. Industry insiders said the illegal call terminations have increased alarmingly in recent times. Just a couple of months earlier, the number of legal international call minutes coming through international gateways (IGW) was 77 to 80 million per day. This has now decreased to 72 to 75 million minutes. BTRC officials said that Teletalk is now running like BTCL, i.e. doing whatever it wants, and the ministry does not care about the irregularities.
When the Teletalk chief was told that the reports were generated from BTRC using SIGOS technology, which identified the illegal calls made through six mobile operators in details, he said: “Teletalk has always taken action whenever it has detected any illegal call terminations through VoIP and we are blocking 5,000 to 6,000 SIMs every day.” “We block the SIMs that are identified to have been used for illegal calls. The problem is that around 45 per cent of the SIMs are still unregistered. So, it is not possible for us to identify the owners of the numbers that are used for illegal call terminations,” he added.
Industry experts said that biometric verification of SIMs has now made it easy to detect the identities of the call terminators. The government is losing billions of takas in revenue every year due to illegal call terminations, they added. The BTRC fined Teletalk Tk. 50 lakh for not adhering to the commission’s instructions on illegal call termination. At that time, the BTRC detected 1,256 Teletalk SIMs being used in illegal VOIPs. As per the rule, the state-run telco was supposed to block the SIMs, but took no steps in this regard.
Private mobile operators said that the telecom ministry is going to issue an order that any operator with an unregistered or pre-activated SIM has to pay USD 50 as fine. But the state-owned company is still violating the rules and thousands of SIMs are being used for illegal activities. These calls were made through illegal VoIPs, where SIM boxes were used to bypass legal channels like IGWs. A SIM box is a device used as part of a VoIP gateway installation. It contains a number of SIM cards that are linked to the gateway, but housed separately from it. A SIM box can have SIM cards of different mobile operators, permitting it to operate with several GSM gateways located in different places. SIM boxes generate significant interconnection revenue losses for mobile operators by bypassing official interconnections, making the operators lose millions of wholesale minutes. Devices known as SIM box detection tools have been installed by the BTRC to identify international calls that are illegally terminated as local numbers through VoIP. The BTRC uses technology from SIGOS (known earlier as Meucci solutions), one of the most advanced and state-of-the-art SIM box detection tools. Experts said that Teletalk—the sole state-run mobile operator—has the dubious reputation of terminating the highest number of illegal VoIP calls. On June 29, 2014, three operators—GP, Banglalink, and Robi—wrote an official letter to BTRC after analysing call flows to their systems from different operators. Citing the call termination data, their letter implied Teletalk’s involvement in illegal termination of international calls.
The BTRC took action and nearly 120,000 SIM cards of the state-run operator were blocked for illegal call terminations in June 2015. According to BTRC data, there are 131.95 million active subscribers in the country, of whom over 116 million have already completed biometric registration so far. By May 31, 49.6 million GP SIMs, 27.8 million Banglalink SIMs, 20.2 million Robi SIMs, 7.4 million Airtel SIMs, 2.3 million Teletalk SIMs, and 2.2 million Citycell SIMs were re-registered. SIMs of the remaining 23.84 million active subscribers have been blocked along with 76.159 million inactive SIMs.