STAFF REPORT IBD: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) is presently busing acquiring a modern system to curb grey telephony – illegal telephone call system – which is causing billions of rupees losses to the national exchequer.
At present the grey telephony is incurring $900 million annually to the government, said PTA Chairman Farooq Awan in front of the Senate Standing Committee on Information Technology and Telecommunications.
He said that the current system was installed three years ago, keeping in mind the size of the overall internet bandwidth, however, during the last three years the growth has been exponential of the sector but the authority was unable to monitor the entire illegal traffic.
Therefore, we have been decided to acquire the new system to effectively monitor the whole traffic through a single and central system under the new strategy, ensuring 100 per cent monitoring of illegal traffic,” he explained.
He further said that the presence of the access promotion contribution (APC) provides artificial margin to grey operators and incentivize them to conduct illegal business, adding that the authority had reduced the level of APC from 7.5 cents per minute in February 2009 to 1.25 cents per minute.