KARACHI: No action imminent against erring cellphone firm: PTA keeps survey results secret
By Our Staff Reporter
KARACHI, Oct 24: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has kept the results of its second survey of the services offered by Mobilink under wraps. Sources told Dawn on Monday that the results indicated that the quality of services offered by Mobilink was as poor as it had been in the past. But, they added, the telecoms regulator did not want to initiate action against the country’s largest cellphone operator.
The regional director of the PTA, Rizwan Hydri, refused to comment on Dawn queries as to why the PTA was keeping the results of the survey under wraps.
In a highly questionable move, the PTA decided earlier this year to carry out another quality of service survey from the first week of August.
The telecoms regulator warned Mobilink in April that it would slap a Rs350 million fine on it and terminate its licence if the mobile phone company did not respond to a show-cause notice within 30 days.
The PTA made it clear that the show-cause notice was issued against Mobilink when a recent PTA survey found that the quality of service offered by the mobile phone company was “below the minimum standards given in the licence.”
“In pursuance of the persistent complaints by the users of cellular mobile services in Pakistan, the PTA conducted a survey, fourth in series, from Feb 7, 2005 to Feb 27, 2005 jointly with the representatives of GSM mobile phone operators including Mobilink, Ufone and Paktel. The survey was conducted in line with the detailed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which were mutually agreed between PTA and all the mobile phone operators. These indicators include server congestion, call connecting error, false messaging, frequent call drops and excessive and unjustified billing as a result of false messaging.
The tabulated results have shown that the quality of service is far below the minimum standards given in the licence. So in order to ensure that the interests of the users are duly safeguarded and protected and that the licensee is providing the poor quality of telecom services to the users, a show-cause notice has been served to the Mobilink,” said the telecoms regulator.
The PTA found Mobilink’s response to the show-cause notice to be “dissatisfactory”, and yet it desisted from penalizing the cellphone company for its continued poor performance.
A press statement issued by the PTA says: “In a letter written to M/s Mobilink, the Authority said that the arguments, the operator presented during the hearing in response to PTA show-cause notice on poor QoS, were just to avoid the allegations on one pretext or the other. The Authority said that the plea taken by the licensee regarding factors influencing QoS were unfounded and unreasonable.”
“During the hearing on June 9, 2005, the Authority also observed that the management of the company did not take appropriate measures to improve QoS offered by the company and as a result the subscribes continued to suffer. “The Authority, on the request of the company, has given four weeks grace period to improve the quality of service and another technical survey to check the QoS offered by the company would be launched immediately after the period expires.”
