Immediately after Airtel's arrival, big player started to unveil deep cuts in their tariff rates, leading to decline of maximum call rate to about Tk1.49 from Tk2.30 per minute.
"The big operators have thrown down the gauntlets to Airtel before it could even shake up Warid management," said the official.
Charges for calls from one operator to another operator are also going down despite high termination fees, officials said.
The operators have also scythed down peak and off-peak tariff structures-- bringing the average rate to around Tk 0.70 per minute. Charges for text messages, popularly known as SMS, have also halved to Tk 0.50 to Tk1.0.
Despite paying a hefty tax for selling new connection, the operators have also reduced prices for SIM cards to between Tk 150-500 per line.
Robi -- formerly known as AKTel -- launched a per second pulse offer for prepaid subscribers, which allow users to call at Tk 0.02 from midnight to 5pm and at Tk 0.03 from 5pm to midnight.
Market leader Grameenphone has also launched three packages - Shohoj, Bondhu and Aapon - based on customers' individual calling requirements, allowing users to make call at a cost of Tk 0.49 to Tk 1.49.
The company has termed the new offers as the "largest and most comprehensive tariff offer" for its subscribers since its inception in 1998.
In the last quarter, Robi became the biggest winner as the country's third largest operator added 1.3 million new users, more than double than the rest five have won during the period.
Robi pointed to aggressive marketing and a raft of attractive packages for its 'impressive performance'.
"In the last two quarters we have done extremely well," said Segufta Samad, head of Corporate Affairs of the company. "Our raft of attractive packages have wooed customers."
GP added 0.64 million users to retain its pole position with 23.9 million subscribers, according to the data of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, the industry regulator.
Banglalink, owned by Egyptian giant Orascom, sold 0.35 million new connections to keep its second position intact with 14.22 million subscribers.
Warid has yet to see any big leap in the subscribers' base as the company has yet to come up with any major new packages from its newmanagement.
Citycell, owned by South East Asia's biggest telecom operators, was the only one which posted negetive growth as its number of active subscribers fell to 1.91 million from 1.95 million despite offering the lowest intra-network tariffs.
State-owned Teletalk has continued to be bottom-placed with 1.07 million users.
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