STAFF REPORT KHI: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has equipped itself with a more efficient system in order to identify international calls illegally terminated by the countrys gateway exchanges.
A recent raid on the office of Wisecom, one of Pakistans 14 long distance international (LDI) operators based in Islamabad, demonstrates that the newly acquired technology has already started to pay off.
It is to be mentioned here that PTA and Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) have joined hand to control the grey telephony which is incurring billion of rupees loss to the national exchequer annually.
Their combined team has recently raided Wiscoms office in the federal capital and found the accused were illegally terminating international telephony traffic in Pakistan.
The company, according to a PTA official, was found terminating approximately 360,000 illegal international minutes on a daily basis, which were shown as local traffic thus evading government levies on international calls landing in Pakistan.
This was possible with the help of a new technology – grey traffic monitoring equipment – that PTA installed early this October. The system is capable of identifying international minutes that are shown as local minutes by the gateway exchanges involved in grey trafficking.