Abu Saeed Khan passes away
The country's leading telecom policy expert Abu Saeed Khan died at the Combined Military Hospital in the capital yesterday morning after a battle with cancer.
He was 62.
He left behind a legacy of advocacy for telecom policy reforms and stance against corruption.
Saeed was diagnosed with lung cancer around a year ago. He was admitted to CMH on March 30 as his condition deteriorated, his son Taufik Mahmood Don told The Daily Star yesterday.
A self-taught technology expert, Saeed advised numerous tech giants and international organisations, helping to shape technology at the service levels in Bangladesh.
"I found him a good man and a senior person, who contributed to the development of the telecom sector and improvement of the country," Md Rezaul Kader, a former commissioner of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, told The Daily Star.
"Saeed had a great grasp of the telecom sector. He contributed to the formulation of the International Long-Distance Telecommunication Services Policy and I sought his advice often while issuing directives."
Saeed held the position of senior policy fellow at LIRNEasia, a think-tank based in Colombo.
From August 2010 to July 2012, he served as the secretary general of the Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh. Before that, he was a strategy analyst at Ericsson's Southeast Asian head office in Malaysia.
He was also the technology editor at bdnews24.com and a research analyst at EMC World Cellular Database (now owned by Informa), where he covered the mobile telecommunications markets of Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal.
As a journalist, he influenced various policies for the telecom sector of Bangladesh. His reports, which revealed anomalies, alerted the authorities and led to interventions that saved public funds.
In 2002, he was a key person behind the government decision to join the SEA-ME-WE4 consortium, linking the country with its first submarine cable.
The next year, he played a similar role when the government established a Class-4 switch, known as ATOB Tandem, which significantly alleviated the mobile operators' interconnection issues with the state-owned carrier.
He had over 30 years of diverse experience as a senior executive, international consultant, and policy researcher.
Saeed had worked with global organisations such as Ericsson, Huawei, Facebook, Google, the World Bank, and the United Nations ESCAP in various international and local capacities.
He also wrote on the telecom sector's policy reforms.
Saeed left behind a son, a daughter-in-law, and a host of well-wishers.
His first namaz-e-janaza was held at the CMH mosque after Zuhr prayers yesterday. He was buried next to his wife's grave after a second namaz-e-janaza in Tangail in the evening.