MyAdhan Blog

Link: Pakistan: PTA lacks knowledge of market dynamics

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has not defined any parameters to check the mobile subscriber data on regular basis provided by the mobile phone companies, a senior PTA official told Daily Times on condition of anonymity. He said the authority has only two ways to check mobile phone subscriber’s data. First during the annual audit account by analysing their revenues and number of connection they have sold. Second is that, PTA has instructed all the mobile operators to verify their data with NADRA. “But still we cannot say that the data is either of active subscribers or only shows the number of connections sold by the companies,” he added. PTA official spokesperson denied comments on this, when contacted by Daily Times. A senior official in a mobile phone company said, “I guess operators try to emphasise the fact that they are doing great in terms of subscriber number and market share as these are the most obvious and understandable numbers for many stakeholders, and can be publicised easily.” When Daily Times approached the industry people they themselves claimed that the subscriber data is not an accurate measure, as it does not revel the true active subscribers figures. Recently, Chairman Senate Standing Committee on Interior, Senator Talha Mehmood said, “PTA seems least interested in regulating such practices to verify the subscribers data.” A sub-committee is constituted to look into the matter of non-verified SIMs, procedure of SIM issuance, reasons for non-verification and will give its report within 15 days to the standing committee. According to Industry people, the numbers reported on PTA website are based on data provided by the operators. Therefore it is important to note how various operators count subscribers. The 90-day rule is a standard practice in advanced markets. The practice involves counting as ACTIVE SIM any SIM on your network that shows customer activity (SMS, MMS, voice call, etc) within the last 90 days. By this rule, if a SIM does not show any customer activity on the network within the last 90-days, it is counted as inactive. All the operators should follow the 90-day rule, which is a standard practice in advanced markets, to count active/inactive SIMs in order to give a factual picture of market dynamics. Latest figures released by the PTA show that the country cellular subscribers reached 80.30 million by February 2008 with a cellular mobile density of 50.76.