KARACHI, Dec 8: Hundreds of Pakistan Telecommunication Company subscribers faced a great deal of difficulty in making overseas and inter-city calls during Eid holidays.

Well-placed sources told Dawn that the increase in inter-city calls due to special quarter rates offered by the phone utility during Eid resulted in choking of lines which adversely affected the calls made to other countries.

The general manager of the PTCL’s overseas calls department, Abdul Saboor Khan, said that the special quarter rates offered on inter-city calls from 6pm to 7am caused a large number of callers to make NWD calls, which resulted in the choking of the digital transit exchange.

He pointed out that during Eid holidays the outgoing traffic increased by around 20 per cent. “But the PTCL handles more incoming calls than outgoing calls. As a rule of thumb, the proportion between incoming and outgoing calls is ten to one.”

Official sources explained that because of competitive rates, high income level, and time difference, people from abroad made more calls than their relatives in Pakistan.

They said that the PTCL implemented yearly upgrade schemes right before Eid, so as to felicitate its subscribers during Eid holidays. “There are two switches at the international gateway exchange in Karachi. One switch handles around 6,000 circuits which take care of calls in national direction. Similarly, the other switch handles around 5,500 circuits which take care of calls in international direction.”

The sources explained that normally the international gateway exchange handled around 10,000 calls every day. “There are three ways of making overseas calls: first through ISD (international subscriber dialling), second through an operator and third through a prepaid calling card. A large number of PTCL subscribers prefer operator-assisted calls to ISD and the prepaid calling cards calls, because they fear that they might dial a wrong number. The advantage of making an ISD call or a prepaid card call is that it is billed according to a 20-second pulse. Whereas the operator-assisted calls must be more than three minutes long and less than 12 minutes long. All over the world, the operator-assisted calls are at least twice expensive than ISD or prepaid card calls because of the involvement of manpower.”

They said that when the workload was maximum — such as during Eid — all the 78 positions were occupied by operators handling overseas calls. “But under normal circumstances fewer operators man the international gateway exchange. The PTCL offers Rs3.5 per call to operators who connected more than 60 calls a day.”

The sources told Dawn that all telephone numbers that began with zero — such as all mobile numbers, overseas, inter-city numbers, 0800 and 0900 numbers — went to the digital transit exchange from where they were routed to their destinations. “In most cases, this digital transit exchange got choked. It was seen that sometimes operators were sitting idle but subscribers found the line engaged because the digital transit exchange was working at the maximum capacity.”