ISLAMABAD, Oct 30 Pakistan Telecommunication Company and Digital Subscribers Line (DSL) operators on Friday signed an agreement to provide broadband services under the auspices of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority.

The signing ceremony was held at PTA headquarters, Islamabad where Chairman PTA Dr Mohammed Yaseen, Member (Finance) Syed Nasrul Karim Ghaznavi, Member (Technical) Dr Khawar Siddique Khokhar, Senior representatives of PTCL and DSL operators were present. Under this agreement, DSL operators would now have a choice to acquire IP bandwidth from any other operator in addition to PTCL, which would enable DSL operators to offer broadband services at competitive tariffs.

PTCL and DSL operators were unable to reach consensus on some of the issues such as permissibility to DSL operators to lease bandwidth from other private operators, laying fiber in PTCL collocation sites, prices and discounts offered by PTCL for domestic and international bandwidth and provisioning of VPN services.

The DSL interconnect agreement was pending for quite some time. Taking cognizance of the issue, several meetings under the supervision of PTA were held between PTCL and DSL operators to resolve these issues. PTA also carried out detailed consultation with PTCL and DSL operators regarding finalisation of DSL interconnect agreement.