October 13, 2001	Saturday	Rajab 25, 1422

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KOHAT, Oct 12: Due to the indifferent attitude of the local PTCL authorities, U-fone and Mobilink cellular companies have been forced to stop giving fresh connections to the local population and the old numbers are being sold in for Rs7,000 to Rs8,000 in disregard to the rules and regulations, Dawn has learnt.

Under the rules, the subscribers are not allowed to transfer or sell their numbers.

Dealers of the two cellular phone companies were reselling the connections for Rs7,000 to Rs8,000 whereas its actual price was Rs2,250. U-fone had stopped selling connections for the last five months and Mobilink was issuing only 50 connections on weekly basis.

A Mobilink official blamed the PTCL authorities for not granting them local call facility and the subscribers had to pay Peshawar call charges.

A U-fone official said fresh connections would be opened in January when the system would be upgraded.

He said the Pakistan Telecommunication Mobile Limited, the company which runs the U-fone, had not been expecting such a huge response from the public and had imported a system for 150,000 lines only for the whole country.

He admitted that the sub-dealers were reselling the connections on high rates and advised the people to wait for fresh connections.

The Internet users are also facing hardship as they have to wait for long time to get connected and the corporation’s authorities had refused to allocate the required lines for the last one year.

The manager of Brain Net, Mr Zia, when contacted, said the company was receiving hundreds of complaints in this regard daily from the subscribers. He said his organization had deposited the connection fee for 50 lines in February because the system had become extremely saturated, but the PTCL had offered only five connections, which he had refused.

He said that for the convenience of individual subscribers, the service provider had decided to stop the service to the clubs between 6pm and 9pm.