KARACHI, Feb 25: Unable to stop people from making long-distance overseas phone calls bypassing its international gateway exchange, the Pakistan Telecommunication Company has decided to act on the commercial dictum: if you can’t beat them, join them.

Well-placed sources told Dawn on Monday that the PTCL had decided, in principle, to allow a private party to “terminate additional voice traffic originating from the United States and Europe towards Pakistan”.

They added that the PTCL had taken this decision in view of two factors. First, the phone utility had failed to stop people from receiving phone calls from the US and Europe bypassing its international gateway exchange, thus depriving it of considerable revenue every year. Second, the monopoly of the phone utility over basic telephone services would anyhow come to an end on Dec 31.

“By allowing private parties to terminate calls from the US and Europe in Pakistan, the PTCL wants to make hay while the sun is shining bright.”

Insiders told Dawn that the volume of incoming calls, especially from the US, had been on the decrease due largely to direct call termination — a process, at present illegal, whereby long-distance overseas calls were made to terminate on a gateway exchange, other than that of the PTCL, which passed the calls on to the PTCL subscribers in the country.

Callers from Europe and the US constitute 58 per cent of the total incoming 785 minutes.

PTCL officials told Dawn that since June 1999 a surveillance wing of the phone utility had seized more than 15 illegal gateway exchanges in the city whose owners used to terminate long-distance overseas calls from the US and Europe bypassing the international gateway exchange of the PTCL. Their gateway exchanges had been confiscated under the Pakistan Telecommunication (Re-organization) Act 1996 according to which basic telephone services were the prerogative of the PTCL.

The Act declares that “basic telephone services” means the provision of any telecommunication service which consists of two-way live voice telephone service in digital form or otherwise over any fixed switched network or between base stations or switches or modes of any public mobile switched network; real- time transmission or reception of facsimile images over a public fixed switched network; international telephony service; and the lease of circuits for the provisions of the services specified.”

The PTCL officials said that if an illegal gateway exchange operator acquired only 10 telephone lines — either land-lines or mobile lines — he could handle the incoming traffic of around 200,000 minutes every month, thus robbing the phone utility of at least $30,000.

“Direct call termination is a very lucrative business because an operator of an illegal gateway exchange has only two overheads — mobile/PTCL call charges and bandwidth rates — against a sure income of at least $30,000 every month.”

Which was why, they explained, despite the efforts of the surveillance wing of the PTCL, it had failed to put a stop to direct call termination. The Federal Investigation Agency had, therefore, been roped in to initiate an inquiry against cellular phone companies and Internet service providers who were allegedly bypassing the PTCL in international dialling.

They added that in July 2000 the PTCL had also invited expressions of interest from parties interested in operating and maintaining a voice-over Internet protocol service for incoming calls from the US and Europe.