About 18 illegal telephone gateways are functioning in Karachi, while 25 percent of all call traffic of the country is unlawful, thus, resulting in huge revenue losses to the exchequer.
Cybernet Chief Operating Officer (COO) Ansar-ul-Haque stated this, while giving his presentation to the 10th Corporate Information Technology Forum-2004 here on Thursday.
He said that the telecom deregulation process would not be fruitful if experiences of other countries was not shared and carefully studied.
The deregulation process was started in 1995 in Pakistan, he said, adding that "It is too late, but we can be successful, if learned from other countries experiences and we have to move very fast in this direction."
In the last 10 years, Pakistan was not a success story in the field of Internet, data communication and interaction with the private sector.
This issue was not addressed properly in the deregulation process, he said, adding, "there is no clear cut policy about Internet phoney."
The corporate sector feels that the Local Loop (LL) issue is very important and needs to be addressed immediately, he added.
Moreover, the information technology (IT) experts also urged upon the government to follow countries, including Korea, Japan, India and others to make the deregulation process in Pakistan a success.
They said that besides expediting the work, the government also needed to ensure transparency in procedures and processes and maintain across-the-board accountability. The government should also ensure one-window operation and make every functionary easily accessible.
Corporate IT Forum Convenor Feroza Shera said that the government should allow use of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) facility on own network for internal communication.
"Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) must ensure the availability of high speed link infrastructure, equipment and technical support and provide round-the-clock service," she added.
Feroza demanded to give representation to CITF Task Force on IT Advisory Board. "IT literacy should be enhanced via standard curriculum and evaluation process, making youth monitoring programme," she said.
She said the PTCL should improve service levels, response time, clarity on use of VoIP, provide services at lineman's level, implement service level agreements and ensure availability of equipment and support for high speed link infrastructure as networking in Karachi is very poor and needs to be improved.
She also said that the CITF had formulated a steering committee in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad.
PTCL Executive Vice President Shahid Haq in his presentation said change is coming in telecom utility (PTCL) as most of the top officials and executives were taken from the private sector.
"We welcome deregulation and industry should also help by forwarding proposals to increase revenue and to improve customer service," he said, adding that the call tariff was also made customer friendly.
"A separate department is being established, especially to take care of the problems of customers and a pilot project is also initiated in Islamabad for the purpose."
Shahid hoped to start Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) soon.
He said the PTCL was heavily investing in WWL and training of officials from top to bottom as the company intends to grow.
Comments
Comments are closed.