Following the trend from July, the number of mobile phone subscribers in Bangladesh fell significantly in August.

Mobile network operators — Grameenphone, Robi, Banglalink and Teletalk — together lost about 18 million customers, taking the total mobile subscriber base to 19.24 million.

In July, operators lost a similar number of subscribers.

The total number of mobile phone subscribers is calculated based on the purchase of new SIMs (subscriber identity modules) minus the number of SIMs whose ownership has become invalid because they have remained unused for one and a half years.

Shahed Alam, Robi’s chief corporate and regulatory officer, attributed the decline to a recent increase in the SIM fee from Tk 200 to Tk 300. With higher SIM prices, people are less inclined to purchase additional plans, he said.

“This makes it increasingly difficult to connect marginalized communities,” he said, adding that higher costs have deterred many from gaining essential access to alternative connectivity options.

Banglalink alone lost about 9 lakh customers in August, taking its customer base to 4.24 million. The operator lost a similar number of customers in July.

In other words, this caused the carrier’s subscriber base to drop by 0.59 percent year-on-year in August.

The second largest operator in the country, Robi, lost 6 thousand customers, bringing the number of subscribers to 5.83 million. Robi lost a similar number of customers in July.

However, year-over-year, the carrier saw a 1.80% increase in customers.

The number of subscribers of Grameenphone, the main operator, fell to 8.50 million from the loss of 1.6 million customers.

Year-on-year, Grameenphone’s customer base grew by 3.58 percent, the highest among operators.

State-owned Teletalk lost about 20,000 customers, taking its total to 65.3 lakh.

Although the number of mobile phone subscribers in Bangladesh exceeds the population, the actual number of unique users is significantly low.

This discrepancy occurs because current regulations allow each individual to own up to 15 SIM cards, resulting in a larger number of subscribers than the actual number of users.

According to the Bangladesh Sample Vital Statistics, a project led by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, the percentage of people over the age of 15 who own a mobile phone was lower in 2023 than in 2020.

This was attributed to a persistent decline in property since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic due to gloomy economic conditions.

In 2023, only 74.2% of people aged 15 and over owned a mobile phone, marking a slight decrease from the 75.4% ownership rate reported in 2020.

At the peak of the pandemic in 2021, mobile phone ownership among these people fell by 4.1 percentage points to 71.3 percent.

It then rebounded by 2.5 percentage points in 2022. However, last year saw a modest increase of just 0.4 percentage points as the country struggled with ongoing high inflation.

A significant finding of the Bangladesh Vital Statistics sample is the gender gap in mobile phone use.

While 86 percent of men said they owned a mobile phone, only 62.8 percent of women did, revealing a disparity of 23.2 percentage points.

This gap highlights a serious disparity in access to mobile technology between the sexes, signaling the need for targeted efforts to address the underlying causes and promote equal access to mobile devices across all groups.