The Great Tower Robbery

On 16 September 2026, the Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh wrote to the chairman of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission asking for urgent intervention. The numbers in the letter: over the past 20 months, operators reported the theft of around 16,000 metres of power cables, more than 2,000 batteries, and over 500 remote radio units from mobile towers. BTS cards and other critical network equipment, the letter said, have been stolen repeatedly.

The totals are the least interesting part. The composition of the theft is the story, and it points somewhere the industry would rather not look.

The composition is the story

Cables and batteries are scrap theft. Copper goes by the metre to any junk dealer; batteries go by the kilo. But a remote radio unit is serialized, operator-provisioned active equipment with almost no legitimate secondary market. Stealing one means knowing what it is, knowing how to detach it from a live tower without killing yourself, and having a buyer who can move it. That is organized crime with technical labor, not opportunistic scavenging.

The run rate, derived from AMTOB's own 20-month window: about 800 metres of cable a month, more than 100 batteries a month, 25 remote radio units a month. Every month, for nearly two years.

Then there is the insider signal. In Brahmanbaria's Akhaura upazila, three men were caught stealing a tower battery at the Ranikhar village site: Rubel Mia, 28, Mobarak Mia, 22, and Saddam Hossain, 30. All three were employees of Metal Plus, a third-party tower maintenance company. The tower's guard, Monirul Islam Bhuiyan, caught them inside the control room at 9:45pm; they attacked him and tried to confine him before villagers intervened. The guard told police a battery had already been stolen from the same tower in April. The maintenance crew knew the site, knew the schedule, and came back.

Operators have responded the way institutions respond to a threat they misunderstand. One senior executive told TBS the company installed CCTV cameras to deter theft. The thieves started stealing the cameras too. That is an adaptive adversary, and cameras do not deter people who are already inside the fence.

The geography moved

Tower theft was historically a rural crime of remote, unguarded sites. AMTOB's letter says incidents intensified over the past eight months in and around Dhaka: Badda, Mohammadpur, Lalbagh, Narayanganj, Narsingdi, Savar, Gazipur. When a rural crime reaches the capital's periphery, one of two things happened: the rural targets hardened, or the networks scaled up and got bolder. The 20-month window runs from roughly January 2025 to August 2026, which sits squarely over the post-transition law-and-order trough. Nobody at AMTOB will say that on the record. The timeline says it for them.

The energy nexus

The theft wave is running on top of a power crisis, and the two multiply. In April 2026, AMTOB warned BTRC of an imminent nationwide telecommunications blackout. The numbers behind that warning: operators burn nearly 100,000 litres of fuel a day keeping the network alive, roughly 52,000 litres of diesel and 20,000 litres of octane for base stations plus over 27,000 litres for data centres. In rural areas, load-shedding runs eight to ten hours a day against battery systems designed to sustain four to six.

Batteries are the weak link in that arithmetic. Stealing backup batteries during chronic load-shedding does not just cost replacement money; it takes sites dark exactly when the grid fails. The theft wave and the power crisis are the same crisis wearing two faces.

The misdirected ask

Tower security is a police matter. AMTOB wrote to the telecom regulator. That is not confusion; it is positioning. Operators carry quality-of-service obligations, and theft-driven outages could draw BTRC penalties. Getting the regulator to acknowledge theft as a systemic external threat buys cover on quality metrics and strengthens any future case for passing the costs through to subscribers. Watch for that framing to surface the next time QoS fines or tariff discussions come up.

What we don't know

AMTOB gave counts, not taka: there is no published monetary value for the losses, no operator-wise split, no arrest or conviction data, and no BTRC response on the record as of publication. The 20-month window and all three headline figures are the industry's own claims, directionally credible and precisely unverified. Three observables, stated so they can be proven wrong. First, BTRC's reply to the 16 September letter: silence means the operators are on their own. Second, the next QoS enforcement round: if theft-affected outages get penalized anyway, the letter failed. Third, contractor vetting: if the next insider arrest involves another maintenance firm, the industry has a supply-chain problem it is treating as a policing problem.