LAHORE, May 2: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has launched a country-wide survey to check the quality of internet service providers (ISPs). Under its criteria, service ability, setup time, download speed, download time, sustainability, users access lines and bandwidth subscriber will be checked.

PTA regional-director Col Nayyar Hasan told Dawn on Monday that the survey had been launched after receiving numerous complaints against the poor quality of the ISPs across the country. “Most complaints are about download speed, congestion, slow speed and error in web-page opening,” he explained.

Mr Hasan said the authority time and again monitored the quality of service parameters technically and also conducted public hearing in this regard.

He said the survey would be completed by June 15 and its report would be made public in the first week of July. In the light of the survey report the different ISPs would be placed in categories like A, B, C or D, he added.

He said: “Relative marks for brandwith subscribers would be added when the inspection of all ISPs would be completed. The ISP with highest ratio will be given 10 marks and others get 10 (X\H) marks (rounded to nearest whole number). X is the bandwidth subscriber ratio of the ISP to be graded and H is the highest ratio.”

Technically the quality of services will be measured with percentage of parameters such as sign-in attempts, connectivity success rate and web-page opening. The growth in number of users is said to be so fast that the facilities can not cope with the demand.