LAHORE: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has directed the cellular mobile companies to provide their Biometric Verified System (BVS) subscriber base of 90 days active (SIMs) on a monthly basis from now onwards so that none of them can ‘misquote’ the statistics to take any kind of advantage in the competitive market.

The PTA directive issued here on Friday said: “Authority instructed the CMO (cellular mobile operators) to provide monthly subscribers information as per the definition of ITU (90 days active subscribers) but BVS verified.”

“The directive has been issued in order to stop the practice of misquoting the subscriber base,” a PTA official said.
Interestingly, some of the operators had raised questions on the subscribers number of one operator the PTA website was displaying which they believed was not correct.

When the CMO - Mobilink, Ufone, Telenor, Zong and Warid - launched the biometric verification of SIMs in second week of this January, there was a ban on issuance of new SIMs at their retail centres on the directive of the PTA. And during the next three months their subscriber base declined with one exception.

According to the PTA, during the period (Jan 15 to April 15) Mobilink number reduced by 235,490, Ufone 3.5 million, Zong 188,977 and Warid 1.47 million. Only Telenor subscriber base increased by 804,178, raising many eyebrows as how its number of subscribers could increase while the unverified SIMs were getting blocked.

“Our subscriber base was showing upward trend before BVS. The numbers which had been blocked under BVS will be reflected deactivated after 90 days,” Telenor Director Communication Atifa Asghar replied to Dawn’s query.

She said the other reasons as why the Telenor number increased in the said period were the SIMs sold on its franchises and sale and service centres. “Besides, a number of subscribers ported in through Mobile Number Portability and the dormant number of its subscribers also got active,” she said.

The total active mobile subscriber base was about 140 million till BVS system was launched in the country in mid-January. Mobilink was then market leader with subscriber base of 38.5 million, followed by Telenor 36.5 million, Zong 26.3 million, Ufone 22 million and Warid 12.5 million.

The position of the CMOs however remained same after BVS. Some 20 million active SIMs have been blocked after the BVS exercise.

Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2015

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