KARACHI, Oct 12: The so-called complaint number of the Pakistan Telecommunication Company, known as '18' in common parlance, has lost its utility, as most complaints registered through it go unattended.

Sources told Dawn on Tuesday that lack of supervision on the part of high-ranking PTCL officials was responsible for the delay in rectification of phone faults. They added that linemen working in cahoots with sub divisional officers did not repair faulty connections at the earliest and succeeded in outmanoeuvring what the PTCL claimed to be a foolproof fault- removing system.

However, a spokesman for the PTCL said that the complaint number '18' was working properly. He added that consumers had no complaints about the complaint number. "When a subscriber lodges a complaint at '18', he is given a computer-generated complaint number by an operator.

The computer at the complaint cell is connected to the server of a telephone exchange which passes the complaint on to the testing computer, asking it to determine the nature of the complaint in the light of the testing parameters fed into the system.

The testing computer figures out whether the fault is in the line or in the cable or in the switching system or in the main distribution frame. "Once the fault is detected, a PTCL testing and complaint assistant engineer asks the sub-divisional officer concerned to get a lineman to remove the fault.

After removing the fault, the lineman submits a compliance report to the SDO, stating whether or not the fault has been removed. The SDO makes sure that the fault has been removed and then sends the report to the divisional engineer concerned," the sources explained.

Sources said that in most cases the lineman submitted a positive compliance report to the SDO, claiming that the fault had been removed. Without checking the authenticity of the report, the SDO okayed it, they added.

When contacted, the PTCL executive vice-president (operations), Rehmatullah, blamed civic agencies for damaging cables in the city. "These agencies carry out development work without informing the PTCL.

Sometimes they completely damage our cables and other times they leave them half damaged. These cables become faulty when it rains. I believe that lack of coordination between various civic agencies and the PTCL is responsible for the occurrence of faults," he said.

The top PTCL official disagreed with this reporter that quite often faulty phone lines remained unattended for a long period of time. He said that non-availability of cables and other equipment was responsible for a delay in quick rectification of faults.

He conceded that Orangi Town and North Karachi were areas where faults occurred frequently. But, he said, a crash programme was initiated in these areas to enable the PTCL officials to repair phone faults without delay.

Mr Rehmatullah explained that the PTCL was renovating cables of commercial concerns at its own expense. He added that in the first phase, the cables of six plazas had been renovated.