Most people know their internet provider as a monthly bill and a phone number to call when the line drops. Carnival Internet wants to be more than that. At its Gulshan office on Thursday, group chief marketing officer Hasan Mehedi announced an ecosystem marketplace app, due in the middle of September, through which the company’s subscribers will pay their bill and also consult a doctor, buy small insurance policies, take courses in Bangla and earn money reselling products.
Who Carnival is
Carnival Internet is part of the Dot Lines Group and started in 2015. It has since built its own fibre broadband network in 403 upazilas, reaching more than 31,000 villages and towns and more than 450,000 subscribers — numbers that make it, by geographic reach, the country’s largest broadband ISP, a status recognised by the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC). Where the big mobile operators sell data by the gigabyte, Carnival sells a cable into the house, in places where nobody else has laid one.
What the app will contain
The first test version handles bill payment and connection management. Four services follow, each an existing Dot Lines business folded into the same login:
- Carnival Learning — online courses in Bangla to build skills, including English through BBC Janala, pitched at young people trying to enter freelancing.
- Carnival Care — telemedicine and other health services delivered to remote villages, where a doctor is otherwise a bus ride away.
- Carnival Assure — micro-insurance, bringing several leading insurers’ health and life products into one place with small premiums.
- bSeller — a zero-investment reselling platform: anyone can list and sell products through it and keep a margin, without holding stock.
Why an ISP wants to be a super-app
The logic is distribution. Carnival has something the health, insurance and e-learning startups in Dhaka do not: a paying relationship with hundreds of thousands of rural households and a technician who has physically been inside their homes. Every one of those subscribers already opens an app monthly to pay. Putting a doctor, a policy and a course a tap away on that screen costs Carnival little and gives the other businesses a customer base that would otherwise take years and a great deal of advertising to reach. The risk is the usual one for super-apps — doing five things adequately rather than one thing well, and the reselling model in particular needs careful handling in a country with recent, painful memories of e-commerce schemes. But the underlying idea, that the broadband line is the road and everything else is the traffic, is the right one for a company whose real asset is where its cables go.
