Grappling with the issue of grey traffic resulting in financial losses of over Rs 3 billion annually, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has busted another illegal gateway exchange operating in Karachi. According to details, the illegally set-up exchange was detected through the Technical Facility recently installed by the PTA to monitor the illegal business of telecom throughout the country.
It is the first illegal operation detected through this state-of-the-art facility made operational on May 1 this year. Upon investigation and confirmation, a successful raid was conducted at a residential bungalow in Defence Housing Authority, Karachi, and an operational international gateway exchange was seized.
The set-up was using 130 Mbps bandwidth for international connectivity while hundreds of GSM SIMs were being used for local call termination. The confiscated equipment includes 06 Quantim Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateways (with 24 ports each) and a rack of cellular devices along with other accessories. It is estimated that the set-up has caused a revenue loss of Rs 25 million in last 10 months of operations. Further investigations are underway by FIA, and it is expected that allied set-ups would also be unearthed shortly.
Grey telephony is a term referred to the illegal telecom traffic in which calls from foreign countries are brought in the country as local calls while using illegal means, which is an offence under Telecom Reorganisation Act, 1996. The PTA had evolved some regulatory and technical measures to curb this menace, such as establishment of vigilance cell in PTA in July 2005, reduction in accounting settlement rates (ASR).