KARACHI: PTCL may cut tariff when private firms become operational
By Bahzad Alam Khan
KARACHI, Aug 7: The Pakistan Telecommunication Company will have to make tariff adjustments — most probably downward revision — when private companies become operational in the telecommunications industry.
This was disclosed by the Islamabad-based member operations of the PTCL, Zahir Mohammad Khan, to Dawn on his recent visit to Karachi.
Mr Khan, a retired captain, said that in the changed telecommunications scenario in Pakistan, the PTCL’s performance would be affected by an oversized workforce — nearly 60,000 strong — and the unwiedly copper equipment.
Established as a public limited company in 1996, the PTCL is 88 per cent owned by the government. At present, the PTCL is the sole dominant player in the country’s telecommunications market with a share of about 98 per cent of telecommunications stock market capitalization. Its overall share in the telecommunications industry in terms of financial size stand at around 79 per cent, with mobile companies following at 13 per cent, Internet service providers at 4 per cent and payphone companies at 3 per cent.
The PTCL member operations said the phone utility was gearing up to meet the challenges thrown up by the deregulation policy okayed by the federal government in June.
Recently, the federal minister for information technology, Awais Ahmed Khan, conceded that the PTCL would lose six per cent of the total revenue after the entry of private telecom players into the market.
Nevertheless, he announced that licences would be issued to private operators for a period of 20 years and would be subject to regulation by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority.
Mr Khan said the deregulation policy was technology neutral and allowed new telecom players to employ whichever technology suited them economically.
He told Dawn that the PTCL was going into the field of optical fibre access network for which tenders had already been issued and letters of interest accepted from private parties. He added that the optical fibre access network would be available to PTCL subscribers by March or April the next year.
He said the phone utility had introduced a number of measures to ensure the retention of existing subscribers. “The PTCL has opened one-window service centres. It has also set up corporate customer centres. All these steps are aimed at stopping PTCL subscribers from being lured away by private telecoms players when they become operational in the phone industry,” he said.
Well-placed sources told Dawn that the PTCL was signing a service level with the Internet service providers of the country, thus fulfilling one of their long-standing demands.
“Under the agreement, the PTCL will ensure that a circuit is available to the Internet service providers of the country at all times. If the phone utility fails to keep its word, it will have to pay a compensation. This would largely rule out the possibility of the collapse of the Internet backbone of the country, which had happened on July 7 in the wake of widespread rains,” they explained.
They said the PTCL was also introducing a new concept which, in technical parlance, was known as peering. “The Internet traffic of the country goes to the United States. The new technology would allow Internet service providers not to send the Internet traffic intended for a server in the country to go to the US,” they said.
