Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) Regional Director Engineer Rizwan Ahmed Hydri has said the mobile industry is expected to absorb around five billion-dollar investment in the country within next five years that would leave a major impact on job market and development in the sector.
Talking to newsmen here, he said the PTA regularly monitored the quality of service and promptly reacted to public complaints.
He called upon the mobile phone service providers to expand their network to improve the quality of service besides slashing their tariff to ensure "availability of high quality value-added services to the common man at affordable prices".
PTA Regional Director hoped the competitive environment would force the mobile phone service providers to improve their service quality through value-addition after achieving tariff stabilisation.
He said the beginning of mobile phone service by Al-Warid of the UAE had marked the completion of the deregulation of cellular mobile phone sector process in Pakistan. With that, the new phase of development would start in the cell-phone industry in Pakistan, he hoped.
"Beginning of the next phase and ushering a new era in the cell-phone industry is marked with stabilisation of tariff structure and improved the quality of service," he said.
"Cell-phone industry has already poised to absorb a big chunk of investment in local currency and foreign exchange," he said, adding a sizable foreign exchange investment had already been made and investment worth billion of rupees was taking place.
Responding to a query, he said competition in the telecom job market was gearing up day by day. "Right from lineman, wire technician to a level of Engineer, demand for Human Resource is increasing rapidly. Vendors' industry is no exception to it," he remarked.
To a question about the government gains, he said the government earnings in the form of various taxes were overall the expectations and estimation. According to the various market surveys, healthy competition among the major players would force them to commit an investment worth five billion dollars within five years, which would generate more than two million job opportunities in the country, he added.
He said the total cellular subscribers had reached 11.6 million showing a growth rate of 24.31 percent in May, 2005 as compared to December 2004, showing a total teledensity of 10.37, out of which 3.33 was fixed, 0.13 was Wireless Local Loop and 6.91 was mobile density.
There were 9.732 million cell-phone subscribers in Pakistan by March 2005 as per sale of sims, he said and informed the total number of cell-phones subscribers was slightly over eight million by 2004, five million by 2003 and merely 1.238 million by 2003.
He said the Mobilink was enjoying the status of Significant Market Power (SMP) with 6.019 million subscribers and Ufone with 2.147 million of subscribers was the number two in the row. Instaphone had 0.543 million subscribers, Paktel 0.323 million, while the new entrants were making good pace in expanding their client base, he added.
He said so far 10 companies in the sector were expected to make an investment of 2,100 million dollars, which included Telenor 400 million dollars, Warid 392, PTCL 273.3, world Call 115, Telecard 165, DV Com 38, Dan Com 12, Burraq Telecom 21.5, Redtone 38.2 and existing Mobile would invest 645.5 million to be operative or maintain their operations in the country.
Replying to a question about the coverage of the service, he said the rollout obligations included coverage of 70 percent tehsil headquarters in four years (at least 10 percent in each province), and they had signed performance bond worth 30 million dollars to ensure compliance with rollout obligations.