March 14, 2008	Friday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 5, 1429

ISLAMABAD, March 13: Complaints against the telecom service providers have gone down but so has their quality of service, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said (PTA) in its quarterly October-December report.

During the period, the PTA registered 3,886 complaints against all the service providers including the PTCL, mobile, Wireless Local Loop (WLL) and other service providers compared with the 4,653 registered between July-September last year.

The overall complaints against the operators had declined by about 17 per cent.

Regarding service quality, maximum complaints were received against the PTCL, 74 per cent, which still held monopoly over fixed line services in Pakistan. The cellular mobile sector came at second place with 23 per cent complaints against it.

There was a 32 per cent decrease in number of complaints against mobile phone service providers during the current quarter (Oct-Dec). The PTA received 889 complaints against 1,317 during the last quarter. The complaints reflected dissatisfaction over the services provided by the mobile operators.

However, complaints related to the quality of service of all the mobile companies increased compared with the previous quarter. The PTA highlighted congestion and connectivity in the networks as major problems. Complaints related to obnoxious calls and spam SMS continued unabated.

The mobile companies had been asked by the authority to warn their subscribers and in some cases block the numbers. Most of these calls originated from unregistered SIMs. There was also a significant increase in complaints related to Mobile Number Portability (MNP).

However, there seems to be some mistake in the PTA statistics in giving the share of complaints without taking into account the size of the market share each cell phone company has.