Telecoms, internet in Pakistan

Cellular companies join hands against WLL operators

KARACHI: Major cellular companies have joined hands against wireless local loop (WLL) operators and approached the telecom regulator to penalise one of the companies, just days after the authorities’ findings that most of the service providers are not following the determination on limited mobility.

Telecom sources said Paktel, Telenor, Warid and Mobilink had signed and sent a formal complaint letter to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority pointing out the violations of regulated policies by the WLL operators.

“The complaint, in fact, defines overall violation by the WLL operators for effectively providing cellular services, which amounts to clear violation of the determination on implementation of limited mobility issued by the PTA,” said a source citing the complaint text.

“Mobile phone operators have raised their concerns recently and expressed doubts on the intentions of the WLL operators, who opted for limited mobility.”

He said the cellular service providers were of the view such violations by the WLL operators could lead to serious damages to the companies investing billions of dollars in infrastructure development.

“The cellular companies are the only parties licensed to provide mobile telecom services in the whole of Pakistan, and have collectively invested billions of dollars in this behalf,” he said.

Fresh complaint lodged by the cellular companies has come up as second serious signals of violations in less than a month, as the PTA couple of weeks ago raised the same concerns in its quality survey report conducted for the WLL operators across the country.

“It was also observed in the survey that WLL operators are not strictly following the determination on limited mobility,” the PTA said in a statement issued after the survey report.

“Therefore, they have been asked to take immediate action to implement the same and submit a compliance report to PTA by 15 December 2006,” said the watchdog. The cellular companies’ complaint appears to match the regulators’ findings.

“The cellular companies argue that WLL licenses are fixed line telecom licenses in which the service provider has to identify a subscriber with respect to a fixed address (either home or an office) allowing the subscriber to move about within a cell,” said the source.

“Therefore, mobility beyond a single cell will lead them into the domain of cellular mobile operations.”

In this regard, he said, the PTA carried out a detailed consultation with all the stakeholders and in July 2005 issued a determination that restricted the mobility in WLL system to a single Home-Cell.”

The government deregulated the telecom sector in 2003 in a move believed to enhance teledensity and to promote basic telephony mainly the in the rural parts of the country. The Telecom Policy 2003 prepared in line with this objective applied to opening up of the fixed line telecom facility.

The policy also known as fixed-line policy proposes two types of licenses, which includes local loop fixed-line and long distance and international (LDI) fixed-line. But since the start of WLL operations, they have been facing strong opposition from the cellular companies.

“It is important to keep in mind that the aim of the WLL was not to provide mobility to the customers, rather it was to provide fixed wireless access (FWA), which is an alternative to fixed line or Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS),” he said.

“If the mobility factor was more important for the Pakistani consumer, the government could have issued many more cellular mobile licenses to meet the market demand. But it was estimated that for a market like Pakistan, six cellular operators will be more than enough to achieve an adequately competitive environment.”

The government charged over Rs10 million for each license of WLL operations and it awarded some 84 licenses to 36 companies for fixed line local loop; fifteen companies have been given 90 licenses for WLL while 12 licenses were issued licenses for LDI.

The government however set $291 million as a GSM license fee and the six companies claim to have spent $3 billion collectively so far to build an infrastructure. By the end of November 2006 the six cellular companies enjoyed more than 46 million subscribers across the country compared to 1.42 million customers of WLL operators.