KARACHI, Jan 18: Despite the fact that most complaints received by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority pertain to the faulty billing mechanism of the Pakistan Telecommunication Company, the phone utility has failed to evolve a mechanism whereby it can put to rest the misgivings of a subscriber who suspects that the phone utility has issued him an inflated bill, showing more phone calls than he actually made.

Well-placed sources told Dawn on Saturday that over the past one year the PTA received 362 complaints by subscribers regarding the poor performance of the PTCL. “Most complaints pertained to the billing mechanism of the phone utility. The telecoms regulator managed to redress 332 complaints while 32 complaints are being looked into.”

They said the reason why the number of complaints had been less than what it should be was that people were not aware of the fact that they could lodge complaints against the PTCL with the PTA. “Most subscribers approach the customer service centres of the PTCL. They keep turning to the customer service centre until their complaint is not redressed. They do not know that they can lodge their complaints with the PTA as well,” they said.

The sources said the PTCL had no mechanism of issuing an itemized bill of local calls.

“The PTCL does issue itemized bills of international calls, inter-city calls and calls made to mobile phones, but it cannot issue detailed bills of local calls.”

PTCL officials defended the practice of not issuing itemized bills of local calls by arguing that the phone utility provided a secret code to all subscribers free.

“If subscribers use the secret code nobody can misuse their telephone numbers and they will not get inflated bills,” an official said.

The PTCL officials added that secret code facilities were given to subscribers only in India and Pakistan. “Nowhere in the world any telecommunications company issues itemized bills of local calls.”

They said it was not possible for the PTCL to keep a record of local calls made by its more than 800,000 subscribers. “Just imagine that the enormity of the database if we were to keep a detailed record of the local calls made by over 800,000 subscribers,” they said.