KARACHI: PTCL unable to give details of local calls
By Bahzad Alam Khan
KARACHI, Jan 25: The Pakistan Telecommunication Company has no way of putting to rest the misgivings of the subscriber who suspects that the phone utility has issued him an inflated bill, showing more phone calls than he actually made.
Well-placed sources told Dawn on Friday that the PTCL had no mechanism of issuing an itemized bill of local calls.
“The PTCL does issue itemized bills of international calls, inter-city calls and calls made to mobile phones, but it cannot issue detailed bills of local calls.”
PTCL officials defended the practice of not issuing itemized bills of local calls by arguing that the phone utility provided a secret code to all subscribers free of cost.
“If subscribers use the secret code nobody can misuse their telephone numbers and they will not get inflated bills,” they contended.
The PTCL officials added that secret code facilities were given to subscribers only in India and Pakistan.
“Nowhere in the world any telecommunications company, be state-owned or otherwise, issues itemized bills of local calls,” they explained.
They said that it was not practically possible for the PTCL to keep a record of local calls made by its more than 800,000 subscribers. “Just imagine that the enormity of the database if we were to keep a detailed record of the local calls made by over 800,000 subscribers,” they said.
When it was pointed out to them that a lot of people suspected that public call offices, operating in the city in the hundreds, misused their telephone numbers in cahoots with linemen, the PTCL officials argued that if public call offices were to misuse telephone numbers at all, they would make international phone calls which were costlier than local calls.
“We have devised a method with the help of which we can keep a check on the telephone numbers which are making excessive international calls. If the number of calls exceeds a certain limit, we ask the subscriber if he has made those calls or not. If he denies having made those calls, his telephone number is proscribed — debarred from making international phone calls — without delay,” they said.
Experts pointed out that this system of the PTCL contains three major flaws. “First, the calls are checked every 24 hours. If a public call office, or any other person for that matter, misuses a subscriber’s phone during 24 hours, the PTCL cannot inform the subscriber of the fact that his telephone number is being misused. Second, even if the subscriber’s telephone has been misused, he will have to pay the bill. Third, the PTCL system cannot keep a check on the misuse of phones if local calls are made,” they said.
The PTCL officials defended the practice of making the subscriber pay for those calls which he had not made while his telephone number was being misused by somebody else on the ground that the subscriber should have used the secret code.
