The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on Monday declared 19 companies as successful for grant of long distance international (LDI) licenses. 23 companies had applied for LDI licenses. Four companies could not meet the conditions and, hence, were dropped.
The successful companies were M/s AG Telecom, M/s ARY Communication (Pvt) Ltd, M/s Bestel Communication (Pvt) Ltd, M/s Burraq Telecom, M/s Callmate Telips Telecom Ltd, M/s Circle Net Comm, M/s Dancom, M/s DV Com, M/s Link Direct Int'l, M/s Micro Tech Links (Pvt) Ltd, M/s Redtone Telecommunication (Pvt) Ltd, M/s Spell Telecom, M/s Telecard, M/s Telecom Development (Pvt) Ltd, M/s Telenor, M/s Utel Pak Ltd, M/s Warid Telecom, M/s Wise Communication (Pvt) Ltd and M/s WorldCall Telecom.
The PTA held public hearing as part of the telecom deregulation policy to exchange views and comments with the prospective applicants and to address their grievances.
Addressing the participants, PTA chairman Major-General Shahzada Alam Malik (Retd) said that the process to grant LDI licenses would be completed before July 31.
The successful parties were asked to deposit performance bond of $ 10 million. The performance bond was one of the conditions attached with information memorandum.
The chairman said that the authority had given 30 days to successful companies to deposit performance bond fee to expedite the process of issuing LDI licenses.
He extended an assurance to investors that the PTA would make optimum efforts to facilitate the operators and provide a level playing field to all the stakeholders.
The chairman noted that discriminatory attitude would not be adopted against any party.
The chairman said that in view of vast potential available in the telecom sector, response from the local and foreign investors was very positive and encouraging.
He said that the licenses for both long distance international (LDI) and local loop (LL) would be granted in an open and unrestricted regime in a fair, free and transparent manner. The term of the licenses would be for 20 years.
72 companies had applied for LL licenses for different telecom regions and 11 companies for all 14 telecom regions.
He said that companies applying for the LL licenses involving wireless local loop (WLL) service, auction for the allocation of spectrum would be held from July 13.
During the hearing, profile of each was presented for comments, views and objections.
During the hearing, participants raised a number of questions about reference interconnect offer (RIO), co-location, interconnect arrangements and access promotion charges (APC) and many other issues. The authority promptly responded to their questions.
The chairman said that induction of new parties in long distance telecommunication service would greatly help improve quality of service, reduction in telephone tariffs and bring in heavy investment in the country.
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