Bangladesh's telecom overseer to award WiMAX license this year

DHAKA, May 13 (Xinhua) -- The two-day international workshop on WiMAX ended here on Tuesday with an announcement from Bangladesh's telecom regulatory body that it would award license of the service by this year.

The workshop "WiMAX in Bangladesh: Now & Future" was attended by telecom vendors, government officials, phone company representatives and think tanks from home and abroad.

Experts from six vendor partners -- Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Huawei, Intel, Motorola and Nokia Simens Networks -- presented a number of keynote papers to share their thoughts and predictions about WiMAX in several sessions in the workshop.

WiMAX, the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, is a telecommunications technology, aimed at providing wireless data over long distances from point-to-point links to full mobile cellular type access.

"WiMAX is a promising technology and our existing submarine cable has a huge bandwidth and we'll be able to utilize it properly," Manzurul Alam, chairman of Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission (BTRC) said.

"We are hopeful to provide license for the service by this year," he added.

It is projected that if Wimax service starts in Bangladesh, it will draw about 10,000 users by the end of 2008 and over 200,000 by the end of 2010.