August 6, 2003	Wednesday	Jumadi-us-Sani 7, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, Aug 5: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) chairman, Maj-Gen Shahzada Alam Malik (retired), has said the authority is fully aware of its responsibilities to cope with the issues that will arise in an open and unrestricted regime, envisaged in the new telecom deregulation policy.

Gen Alam was speaking at a meeting of PTA and Pakistan Telecommunication Company (PTCL) officials held here to review the progress made by company for expeditious implementation of the telecom deregulation policy.

He said, so far as PTA was concerned, it had made full preparations to implement the policy in a fair and transparent manner. For this purpose, all the documents required by the intending licensees have been prepared, he added.

The PTA chairman informed the meeting that the authority had chalked out comprehensive criteria to evaluate the financial and technical capability in line with the deregulation policy for granting licenses to the new operators.

The PTCL chairman, Akhtar Ahmad Bajwa, appreciated the initiative taken by the PTA to hold consultative meeting with the company officials. Such meetings will provide them an opportunity to appraise the authority of the challenges that may be confronted by the PTCL in implementing the deregulation policy, he added.

The meeting deliberated on a number of issues including provision of interconnect facilities, regulation of tariff, introduction of Access Promotion Contribution (APC) and the obligations of the PTCL to facilitate the new licensees of Local Loop (LL) and Long Distance International (LDI) in a deregulated scenario.

The PTA member (finance), Nehmatullah Khan, and member (technical), Naseem Ahmad Vohra, the PTCL member (technical), Mohammad Sarwar, and member (business development), Mashkoor Hussain, also attended the meeting.