Pakistan's cellular market holds high potential and will keep on growing for the next 10 to 15 years; however, the growth rate would come down after almost one and a half year. Telenor Pakistan CEO Tore Johnson expressed these views during an exclusive interview with Business Recorder here at its regional headquarter.
He said the cellular density in Pakistan had reached around 32 million and there still exists much charm for cellular operators in the market. "The country's cellular market is not a matured market as yet, as very thin population out of 160 million have mobile phones and there is a lot to be done," he observed.
Talking about Telenor, Tore Johnson said Telenor had so far invested around $700 million apart from the amount paid as license fee and added its total investment in Pakistan was going to hit $1 billion mark within a year.
This amount would be spent in increasing the capacity, further improving the infrastructure and expanding the coverage to more and more destinations, he added.
To a question, Johnson said Telenor was offering packages for all segments of the society, adding it was not the right time to expand the product line, as this would create confusion among customers in selecting the package appropriate for them.
"Telenor is the fastest growing service in the country with a subscriber base of around 3.2 million covering 500 destinations," he said and added Telenor may be ranked no. 3 or 4 in Pakistan.
He termed the telecom policy good and encouraging, and lauded the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) role as fair having the ability to deal with different situations.
However, he said, there were some issues and negotiations in this regard were underway with the regulator. Elaborating, he said, the Wireless Local Loop (WLL) was in violation of the determination issued by the PTA to cellular operators and expressed the hope the issue would be resolved soon.
Tore Johnson said the PTCL was an important player in the system being the sole fixed line operator but the PTCL has to improve its service being provided to cellular operators.
He said whenever there was some problem with the PTCL or a breach occurred in its network, cellular operators suffer. "We will be having a dialogue with the PTCL to press them for improving their service," Johnson said. Tore Johnson said Telenor had an international gateway but they had no plans to invest in their own undersea cable.
To a question that another leading cellular operator had jammers installed in the city and used to affect their service, he said there was a fair competition between all six operators but sometimes there were problems on the part of local partners of the international operators.
"The competition is getting intense among operators and there may be some slight reductions in the tariffs but rates are already too low and there is no space for rates to go down further," he remarked. Talking about the implementation of Mobile Number Portability (MNP), he said the system would be in effect by October this year.
About Electronic Identification Register (EIR), the device to jam the use of stolen or snatched cellphones, he said Telenor was the first to install the system but it required all operators to have this system, which would then be linked to a central database. He said the cellular operators were doing the job on their part but there were some other players involved, ie, law-enforcement agencies to curb the menace cellphone snatching.
Comments
Comments are closed.