IT & Telecom secretary Naguibullah Malik inaugurated the new system at a telecom consumer forum with a theme 'Together for consumer rights' organised by PTA at a local hotel.

Naguibullah Malik said the government was facilitating telecom industry so that it could further grow.

He appreciated the new PTA initiative and said 'it was crucial to safeguard our communication systems so that they do not fall in wrong hands.'

PTA chairman Dr Muhammad Yasin said the authority was aware of telecom consumers' needs and taking steps to address them. It had revamped complaint handling mechanism of mobile companies, PTCL and other telecom operators.

'The launch of the new service is another step towards its vision of protection of telecom consumers and their rights. Every mobile user can now find out the number of SIMs issued against their CNIC with the cell company by sending their CNIC number without dashes and spaces to 668 through SMS. Rs2 will be charged on each SMS which is inclusive of all taxes.

In case of unauthorised numbers against his CNIC number, a consumer can get the data corrected from the respective mobile operator's customer services centre,' Dr Yasin said.

He advised the unauthorised SIM owners to register the SIM in their names within seven days of notification from the customer services centre concerned otherwise their calling facility would be stopped after 13 days and the SIM would be completely blocked after 17 days of that notice. 'This service will help further streamline the data of mobile phone users.'

The PTA chairman said in order to address the issue of unauthorised SIMs it first had revamped the system of sale and registration of SIMs and now it introduced this service which would allow mobile subscribers to get those SIMs blocked which at present were not under their usage. 'This system provides an internet and SMS based interface to end-users in order to retrieve the registered mobile SIMs information.'

He said it was a secure and efficient system to store a record size of approximately 100 million subscribers' data. The system ensured proper data integrity mechanism while answering back to multiple queries at a specific time, he added.

Dr Yasin said the overall tele-density in the country had reached 61.8 per cent and there were currently 95.5 million mobile subscribers and the cellular segment led the share in total tele-density followed by fixed land line (FLL) with 3.5 million subscribers and Wireless Local Loop (WLL) with 2.6 million total subscribers.

PTCL senior executive vice-president Sikandar Naqi shared the challenges involved in fixed telecom operations and discussed the measures initiated by PTCL for the safeguard of consumer interests.

He said PTCL had improved the quality of its call centres through system automation and extensive training of customer support representatives and most of the customer issues were resolved at the contact centre level.

'PTCL has also recently launched its services at AJK & Federally Administered Northern Areas (Fana). The company has acquired over 250,000 broadband subscribers in just two years and broadband services are available in over 170 cities.'