Telecom News Bulletin

The teledensity of wireless telephony services has registered a slight increase of 0.1 percent in the country after a period of six months. It reached to 1.7 percent by end of November 2009, latest statistic of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) showed on Friday. The overall Wireless Local Loop (WLL) connections increased to 2.72 million across the country on the network of eight operators by November.

Sector people said the slow roll out of services by operators in rural areas is diminishing the potential of wireless media, however it has great demands in different cities of the country particularly its success utility for public call services sales. WLL operators’ unlimited fixed daily calling added thousands of new users during the last couple of months and attracted new customers. Value-added services also caused growth in users and telephony voice and non-voice services.

The wireless telephony services are frequently used for international calls due to its affordable call packages. The traffic of international calls has been increasing continuously in the current fiscal year. Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) has recorded high number of users with 1.3 million followed by Telecard and WorldCall, having 0.645 million and 0.571 million connections by November 2009. Wateen’s users stand at 0.128 million by end of the same month.

The number of subscribers has seen correction in the last couple of months because of healthy competition among the operators. The other four operators’ user base named Great Bear, NTC, Link Direct and Mytel have been stagnant for the last two months.

PTA claims that WLL services are available across Pakistan in 14 telecom regions. According to PTA, there are 3,451 cell sites in different cities providing coverage in 11,669 urban and rural areas by the end of the last fiscal year 2008-09. The number of cities finished in some areas by the operators stood at 12,000 in 2008.

Via Daily Times