KARACHI, Nov 7: The fact that a new telecommunications company has started laying a cable network in the city is giving jitters to the Pakistan Telecommunication Company whose monopoly over basic telephony will come to an end on Dec 31.

Talking to Dawn on Thursday, the PTCL director general, Iqbal Waseem, admitted that after Dec 31 the telecoms operator would not be able to retain its monopoly. He, however, contended that the new company would not be able to have the infrastructure that the PTCL had acquired over the years.

“The new operators in the field will have the benefit of modern technology, but still they will be able to come in competition with the PTCL in the international service only,” he said.

Mr Waseem pointed out that the new operators might compete with the PTCL in a few big cities, adding that “for overall competition much bigger investment would be required”.

He pointed out that as it is the PTCL was already operating in an environment of competition in the mobile telephone service, Internet service, manufacturing of telephone sets and other equipment.

When asked why the PTCL was not reducing the line rent and the call tariff despite the fact that in some countries local calls were free, he said that worldwide the cost of technology has reduced but there was no significant reduction in the prices of external cable plant and equipment as all these items had to be imported and their prices had gone up because of an increase in the rate of the dollar.

He said that higher investment was required to run the local network and to operate the system of local call while for international telecommunication not much expenditure was required and it was because of this reason that local calls and line rent were higher here and rates of international calls were lower.

The director-general said that in other countries where local calls were free, the line rent was charged around 30 dollars a month which was not possible here.

Meanwhile, sources told Dawn that the PTCL had decided to further modernize its infrastructure facilities and improve its services at a total cost of Rs18 billion.

“The modernization programme also includes the provision for increasing the number of fixed telephones from the current 3.2 million to 3.6 million by the end of 2002,” they said.

They added that the PTCL would shortly invite bids for developing state-of-the-art billing and customer care services to be offered next year at a cost of about 25 million to 30 million dollars.