Chairman Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) Major General Shahzada Alam Malik (Retd) has said that the government was following a liberal policy to ensure a win-win situation for all telecom sector stakeholders.
He gave these observations while addressing a group of journalists at a workshop held by PTA at Bhurban. The objective of the workshop was to help the journalists have better understanding about developments taking place in telecom sector.
The chairman said Pakistan is a promising market and all the operators are getting reasonable profits/ margin on their investment.
He said the users of mobile phone grew to 34.5 million as on June 30, 2006 and it was constantly on rise to go to the new heights in the future.
He gave a breakup on the share of mobile companies in the market, which indicated that Mobilink's share grew to 17 million-almost half of total market, and Ufone's, the second major player over 8 million, Telenor and Warid Telecom managed to take their consumers number to 8 million. Instaphone's share was only 3 percent of 34.5 million.
The chairman noted that PTA was providing a level playing field to all the parties of telecom sector besides protecting the consumers' rights. He added that telecom sector was witnessing very healthy competition to the best benefit of the consumers.
Shahzada Alam was fully confident that the policy of openness will not allow any of the player to have monopolistic role in the market to get undue benefit.
He told a questioner that service quality was a serious problem and PTA being a regulator was on its foot to force the companies that they should improve their quality standard to address the issue on long term basis.
The chairman added that complaint cell remains continuously engaged in handling the consumers' complaints against various telecom service providers and necessary actions are taken for eradication of the problems. He said a significant reduction was observed in their number over the quarters. The other senior PTA officials also gave presentation on grey telephony, WLL, LDI and other services.
MOBILE PHONE SERVICE:
The government's policy for mobile phone service has been a great success. It not only brought huge foreign investment in Pakistan but also quality service for its subscribers. This sector is growing fast and the number of subscribers is increasing with each passing day. Extension of mobile phone service to AJK and Northern Areas was a major initiative of the government.
WLL/LDI SERVICES:
With the expansion of WLL and LDI services, their complaints are also increasing. WLL subscribers are mainly registering complaints for connectivity issues and Internet services. On the other hand, complaints against LDI are mainly for their poor connectivity due to excessive sale of calling cards by the companies.
GREY TELEPHONY:
Grey telephony was termed as a serious problems faced by Pakistan telecom sector. It was costing Rs 3 billion to the government exchequer. PTA has taken a number of steps through its vigilance cell to detect illegal telephony business and take action against those who were involved in this ugly practice. It is going to put in place a system to check grey telephony in six months.