The government has received about 344 million dollars by issuing 19 licences till-to-date from various companies to initiate fixed-line and cellular phone services in the country. Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has issued these licences as part of deregulation process, which would create healthy competitive environment and people would be able to avail increased coverage and better services at affordable prices.
These licences included five Long Distance international (LDI), 19 Fixed Local Loop (FLL) and two for mobile phone after completion of formalities by the concerned companies, PTA sources said here on Tuesday.
The five companies were among the 19 which qualified for grant of LDI licences during the public hearing held on July 5 to exchange views and comments with the prospective applicants, listen to their grievances and remove their doubts and apprehension about the policy and procedure for the grant of licences.
In the public hearing, the authority cleared 19 national and international companies out of 23 for the grant of LDI licences. Four companies did not qualify for the award of LDI licences due to their failure to deposit initial fees and certain other reasons.
The authority had given 30 days to the successful companies to remit the requisite Performance Bond fee to expedite the process of issuing LDI licences. The licences for both Long Distance International (LDI) and Local Loop (LL) were being given in an open and unrestricted regime in a fair, free and transparent manner. The term of the licences is for 20 years.
The companies to whom LDI licence issued so far are Worldcall Telecom, Link Direct International, Callmate Telips Telecom, Warid Telecom and Telecard Limited.
Similarly, the companies issued so far Fixed Local Loop (FLL) licences for different regions are Dancom Pakistan (14 regions), Cyber Soft Technologies (five regions), Wise Communication Systems (five regions), Air Track Telecommunication (three regions), Call 2 Phone (three regions), Web Concepts (three regions), Zari Telecommunications (three regions), Albadar Etisalat, Brain Limited, Hazara Communications, Ion (Pvt) Limited, Noman and Tanveer Telecommunications, Sohail and Inam Pvt Limited, Union Communications, Unified Technologies (Pvt) Limited, Velocity Pvt Limited, World Call Broadband Limited, World Call Multimedia Limited and CCZ.
For the grant of Local Loop licences, 72 companies had applied for LL licences for different telecom regions while out of them 11 companies had applied for all the 14-telecom regions. The companies applying for LL licences involving Wireless Local Loop (WLL) service, bidding for the allocation of spectrum would be held between August 11 to 13, 16 to 21.
As part of deregulation process, PTA has also recently issued cell phone licences to two new companies - Wand Telecom and Telenor. The initiative was expected to add ten million more mobile phone users within the next three years.
The sources said this is a historic step that private companies are being allowed to provide fixed line telecommunication service, which was earlier monopoly of the PTCL.
More licences would also be issued in this category on completion of formalities by the other companies.
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