The Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) has moved the court, second time, against the regulator's determination in which it was asked to reduce bandwidth tariffs.
The PTCL had earlier moved Lahore High Court, Rawalpindi Bench, a couple of month back when the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) had issued its June 23 determination asking it to cut the bandwidth tariff, following which, the Court on August 7 directed the regulator to decide the case within 60 days in accordance with law.
The PTA revised the bandwidth tariffs in October and asked PTCL to implement it. When contacted, official in PTCL confirmed that it had moved the Court against the regulator's determination.
As for International Private Leased Circuit (IPLC) tariffs, effective from January 1, 2007, the PTA reduced the E1(2M bps) for ISPs to $2,100, instead of $3,000, whereas for voice operators it would be $2,300 instead of $2,852. Similarly, for DS3 (45 M bps) ISPs would pay $16,800 instead of $48,000.
STM 1 (155 M bps) price will be $48,300 and $52,900 for ISPs and voice licences, respectively. In addition to the above measures, the Authority has also directed the PTCL to provide E1 (2M bps) at $1,000 on shared basis from January 1, 2007, as being provided by various other countries, such as India.
Similarly, data & voice services rates of Internet Protocol (IP) have also been reduced significantly from January 1, 2007. E1 rates will be $1,500 instead of $1,600, DS3 will be $24,000 instead of $25,000 and STM 1 will be $46,500 instead of $60,000.
Furthermore, IP tariffs for Voice Services for Long Distance and International (LDI) operators have also been revised and reduced by 31 percent to 48 percent which would be effective from January 1, 2007. The DPLC tariffs for voice services have also been reduced by 20 percent to 30 percent.
The PTA annual report also holds PTCL a barrier in proliferation of bandwidth services in Pakistan, citing high broadband tariff and difficulty in access to its cables and ducts as some of the major reasons for low broadband penetration in Pakistan.
The report says that the Authority was facing problems on issues related to local loop unbundling, transmission media, collocation and Optic Fibre Access Network (OFAN) from PTCL besides high prices of International Private Lease Circuit (IPLC) and Domestic Private Lease Circuit which are quite high as compared to other regional countries.
The broadband penetration in the country did not show reasonable growth and there are almost 56,611 broadband subscribers. Among these, 26,611 are DSL subscribers mainly provided by 13 ISPs.
The broadband penetration in Pakistan is very low as compared to other regional countries. In Korea and India, 96 and 19 percent Internet connections are, respectively, on broadband technologies whereas in Pakistan this figure is below 2.3 percent.
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