PESHAWAR, Sept 22: Many subscribers of the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) have complained about excessive billing, saying they were being charged for the calls they had never made.

“My telephone bill shows that the PTCL has charged me even for re-dialling a number when it was not connected on the first attempt,” said Hashim Khan, a resident of Cantonment area.

According to him, he had pointed out this problem to the PTCL authorities, but no action had so far been taken to rectify the situation.

“One unit was charged for every attempt after three seconds in a row for dialling or re-dialling a number, which indicated that the call remained unattended,” he said while showing the bill.

He said on his complaint, the GM deducted the amount charged for re-dialling a number, adding that the waived amount was again included in the bill as arrears.

Sources said recently a Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited official had registered a similar complaint against its own department.

“This is not our fault, it may be an internal problem in the billing software of the PTCL,” said Mr Waseem, an engineer of the company which has installed the unit-charging machine in Peshawar.

Sometimes a caller dial a telephone number and connected to another person, but a speech channel did not locate the recipient, he said.

In that case the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited meter charge a single unit. But these types of complaints were very rare, Mr Waseem said.

“There is no technical fault in our system,” claimed PTCL GM Yousuf Afridi. “Now, the numbers of all complainants will be placed under observation so that if a problem occurs it could be removed promptly,” he said.