GrameenPhone

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GrameenPhone Limited

Type	Limited
Founded	1998
Headquarters	Celebration Point, Road # 113 A, Plot 3 & 5 Gulshan, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Key people	CEO: Erik Aas
Industry	Telecommunication
Products	Telephony, EDGE, GSM
Revenue	600 Million USD^[2]
Net income	6,403.8 Million Taka^[3]
Employees	5000^[1]
Slogan	We are here to help^[4]
Website	www.grameenphone.com

GrameenPhone (Bengali: গ্রামীণ ফোন Gramin Fon) is a GSM-based cellular operator in Bangladesh and market leader^[5] with more than 50% of the Bangladeshi market share. GrameenPhone started operations on March 26, 1997. It is partly owned by Telenor (62%) and Grameen Telecom (38%).

GrameenPhone is the largest mobile phone company in Bangladesh with more than 10 million customers as of December 2006.^[6] It is also the fastest growing cellular telephone network in Bangladesh. At the end of 2005, it had about 3500 base stations around the country with plans to add about 500 in the following six months. Grameenphone's stated goal is to provide cost-effective and quality cellular services in Bangladesh.

On the 16th of November 2006 GP formally changed its logo to match its parent company Telenor's logo. According to GP the new logo symbolizes trust, reliability, quality and constant progress. The name Grameenphone will be kept as part of the new identity. The name Grameenphone carries with it all of the heritage, success and values of our past, added the GP CEO Eric Aas.

1 Products Offered
2 Brief History
3 Numbering Scheme
4 Other activities
5 See also
6 External links
7 References

[edit] Products Offered

A GrameenPhone SIM as delivered

The SIM to as installed into a phone

GrameenPhone offers subscription of two categories: Pre-Paid Subscription and Post-Paid Subscription.

Pre-Paid subscriptions are sub-divided into three plans:

Smile, previously knowned as Easy (mobile to mobile connectivity within Bangladesh),

Smile PSTN previously knowned as Easy Gold (nationwide and international mobile and land line connectivity)

Djuice (a youth based mobile to mobile connectivity within Bangladesh).

A large number of earlier "Easy" users, who have been using GrameenPhone for a long time, with mobile numbers 01711XXXXXX, 01712XXXXXX and 01716XXXXXX, were upgraded to EasyGold or Smile PSTNfree of charge by GP for being old customers.

Post-Paid subscription are sub-divided into two plans:

X-Plore Package 1 (nationwide and international mobile and landline connectivity)
X-Plore Package 2 (nationwide and international mobile and landline connectivity)

GrameenPhone also offers different value-added services including SMS (Short Message Service), MMS (Multimedia Message Service), Welcome Tunes (Ringback Tones), Voice SMS, SMS Push-Pull Service, Voice Mail Service (VMS), and Fax and Data among others. GrameenPhone was the first mobile operator in Bangladesh to offer EDGE services to its subscribers.

[edit] Brief History

The idea of providing wider mobile phone access to rural areas was originally conceived by Iqbal Quadir, who is currently the founding director of the Program in Developmental Entrepreneurship at MIT.^[7] He was inspired by the GrameenBank microcredit model and envisioned a business model where a cell phone can serve as a source of income. After leaving his job as an investment banker in the United States, Quadir travelled back to Bangladesh and worked for three years gaining support from various organizations including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus of GrameenBank and the Norwegian telephone company, Telenor.^[8] He was finally successful in forming a consortium with Telenor and GrameenBank to establish GrameenPhone. Quadir remained a shareholder of GrameenPhone until 2004.

GrameenPhone received a license for cellular phone operation in Bangladesh from the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications on November 28, 1996. GrameenPhone started operations on March 26, 1997, the Independence Day in Bangladesh.

GrameenPhone originally offered a mobile-to-mobile connectivity (widely known as GP-GP connection), which created a lot of enthusiasm among the users. It became the first operator to reach the million subscriber milestone as well as ten million subscriber milestone in Bangladesh.

[edit] Numbering Scheme

Grameenphone uses the following numbering scheme for its subscribers

+88 0171 N₁N₂N₃N₄N₅N₆N₇N₈

where the first 880 is the International Subscriber Dialling Code for Bangladesh and is needed only in case of dialling from outside Bangladesh.

17 is the prefix for GrameenPhone as allocated by the government of Bangladesh. Omitting +880 will require to use 0 in place of it instead to represent local call, hence 017 is the general prefix.

The number N₁ to N₈ is the subscriber number.

[edit] Other activities

[edit] Village Phone

With the help of GrameenPhone, Grameen Telecom operates the national Village Phone programme, alongside its own parent Grameen Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), acting as the sole provider of telecommunications services to a number of rural areas. Most Village Phone participants are women living in remote areas. Village Phone works as an owner-operated GSM payphone whereby a borrower takes a BDT12,000 (USD200) loan from Grameen Bank to subscribe to GP (GrameenPhone) and is then trained on how to operate it and how to charge others to use it at a profit. As in September 2006, there are more than 255,000 Village Phones in operation in 55,000 villages around Bangladesh. This program has been replicated also in some other countries including in Uganda and Rwanda in Africa.^[9]

A typical GrameenPhone tower

[edit] CIC-Community Information Centre

GrameenPhone started a project to provide internet access and other communications services to rural areas. This program is known as 'Community Information Centre' (CIC). Since February 2006 26 CICs have been established across the country as a pilot project.^[10] In this project, GrameenPhone provides GSM/EDGE infrastructure and technical support and other partners Grameen Telecom Corporation and Society for Economic and Basic Advancement (SEBA), are involved in selecting and training entrepreneurs to run the village centres. The computers in these centres in the pilot project are used by an average of 30 people a day, who pay a small fee to access email or Web pages.^[11] These CICs are used for a wide variety of business and personal purposes, from accessing health and agricultural information to using government services to video conferencing with relatives overseas. GrameenPhone also trains the entrepreneurs so that they can give people advice on how to set up an e-mail account and best make use of the Internet.

CIC project is giving up to 20 million people the chance to use the Internet and e-mail for the first time. Following a successful pilot project, GrameenPhone is going to set up approximately 500 centres in communities throughout Bangladesh by the end of 2006. The centres will be located in each Upazilla (sub-district) of Bangladesh. As a result, up to 15 villages containing up to 40,000 people will be within reach of each CIC. In this information center, there will be personal computers connected to GrameenPhone's existing GSM mobile network, which has been upgraded with EDGE technology to offer data transfer speeds of up to 16 kilobytes per second.^[12]

[edit] GrameenPhone Center

Grameen Phone centers serve as a "one stop solution" for customers, with all telecommunications products and services, under a single roof. They are strategically located at all major locations of the country.

The GrameenPhone Centers are designed to increase customer satisfaction by integrating sales and after-sales services in an open, friendly and comfortable environment. In addition to handling all customer service inquires, the GrameenPhone Centers will be positioned as GP's flagship sales channel, selling all GP products and services and also attractively priced handsets with the best warranty and after-sales service. The primary objective of the GrameenPhone Centers will be to enhance customer experience by providing genuine products at competitive prices. GrameenPhone will also maintain strong partnerships with the major handset vendors to ensure attractive prices for the customers visiting the GrameenPhone Centers. The handsets will have warranties and the GrameenPhone Centers will also provide after-sales service for the handsets.

Currently there are over 15 GPC's in the country with more to come soon.^[13]