ISLAMABAD, Feb 15: Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) is holding an open discussion on February 25 to grant Extended global system of mobile phones (EGSM) licence to a mobile phone company, an official source told Dawn.

The source said during the forum, the PTA would present its case of granting EGSM licence to Paktel to convert its technology from AMPHS to GSM. The open forum would be attended by the representatives of consumer groups and mobile phone companies. The forum will be presided over by the PTA chairman.

There are 1.8 million mobile phone users in Pakistan, of which the major share has been taken by Mobilink with around a million consumers. Similarly, Ufone has over 357,000 consumers, Instaphone 298,107 and Paktel 217,635. The current teledensity in Pakistan is 2.6 per cent when it should be at 17 per cent in Asia.

The source said the purpose of granting EGSM licence to Paktel intended to create competitiveness in the market and to offer the consumers a choice to switch to any kind of cellular companies. The policy would not only help in modernizing the company, but it would also help in bringing more investment in the mobile phone sector besides increasing the teledensity in the country.

Presently, the consumers having GSM connections are facing problems as one company does not offer connections all the time while the other company which offer connections have a chronic problem of connectivity due to choking of phone lines. The situation forces the consumers to opt for this technology because the GSM connections were not available.

The connectivity problem of the GSM companies have even made the federal minister for Information Technology and Telecommunications Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari jittery and forced him to ask the PTA to take punitive measures against cellular companies showing poor performance. The minister had also directed the authority to explain what it was doing to regulate and improve the performance of these companies.

The source said with the approval of the EGSM licence, the situation was likely to ease out as the company would be required not only to bring more investment besides the existing number of GSM cellular companies would increase to three from two as the EGSM is in fact a GSM technology.