Grameenphone, the country's largest mobile operator, said on Tuesday, 26 July 2022, that it had carried out trial runs of a 5G network at GP House in Dhaka and in Chattogram, with tests in other divisional cities to follow. Chief executive Yasir Azman and senior staff tried the connection and demonstration "use cases" in the company's innovation lab. "We are trialling 5G connectivity and its use cases to help build a Smart Bangladesh," Azman said, adding that the point was to identify the challenges with everyone involved.
What a trial is, and is not
A trial means a handful of base stations, borrowed spectrum, test handsets and engineers with measuring equipment. It is not a service. Teletalk, the state operator, ran the country's first 5G test at a few spots in Dhaka on 12 December 2021, and nothing has been available to the public since. The spectrum the private operators bought in March, in the 2.3 and 2.6 GHz bands, can carry 5G, but they bought it primarily to relieve congested 4G, and BTRC has not yet held the auction for the 3.5 GHz band that most countries use for their first 5G networks.
What 5G would change
The familiar promises were repeated: a high-definition film downloaded in seconds rather than the hours 4G takes, remote classrooms and surgeries over virtual reality, factories run by AI, drones delivering food, self-driving cars. Strip the marketing and 5G brings three real things: much higher capacity per tower, so crowded areas stop slowing down; latency of a few milliseconds, which matters for industrial control and gaming; and support for thousands of low-power sensors per cell, the "internet of things". For a Bangladeshi consumer, the first benefit is the one that will be felt: faster data in the same places where 4G currently crawls.
Do you have a 5G phone?
Probably, if you bought a phone above Tk 25,000 in the past year. Most Samsung A-series and above, the iPhone 12 onwards, and mid-range Xiaomi, Realme and Vivo models sold here support 5G; the Tk 15,000 phones that make up most of the market do not. It does not matter yet, and manufacturers know it; several "5G" models sold locally cannot use the bands Bangladesh is likely to deploy.
Realistic timeline
Operators need a spectrum auction, a business case in a market where average revenue per user is among the lowest in the world, and fibre to the tower, which most rural sites lack. Industry executives privately talk about 2024 or later for a commercial launch in Dhaka. Until then, the best thing 5G trials do for ordinary subscribers is push operators to fix 4G first.
