Telecom: PTA’s new system to curb grey traffic up and running

The telecom body finally has an effective way to clamp down on illegal telephony.

KARACHI:

In what may be seen as a positive step towards controlling the grey traffic, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has equipped itself with a more efficient system to identify international calls illegally terminated by the country’s gateway exchanges.

A recent raid on the office of Wisecom, one of Pakistan’s 14 long distance international (LDI) operators based in Islamabad, demonstrates that the newly acquired technology has already started to pay off.

PTA and Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) raided Wiscom’s office in the federal capital on Monday. The telecom sector’s regulatory body found that the company was illegally terminating international telephony traffic in Pakistan – a practice commonly known as grey traffic – thus evading government taxes in excess of $11 million a year or $31,000 a day.

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.

Using the newly installed system, PTA analysed Wisecom’s traffic patterns and found anomalies, thus filing a complaint with FIA. Later on, the two regulators conducted a joint raid on the company’s head office.

The acquisition of this new technology by the telecom regulator, which has failed to control grey traffic so far, may help the government increase its revenues.

According to industry estimates reported by The News in its April 7th edition, grey market for telephony – which is about 400 million minutes per month or more than 50% of the overall monthly international traffic coming to Pakistan – causes over Rs3.5 billion or $35 million in losses a year to the national exchequer.

This loss is caused by illegal gateway exchanges that bypass legal gateways to terminate or originate international telephony traffic by using voice-over-internet protocol (VoIP) gateways, wireless local loop (WLL) phones and mobile phone SIMs.

The old systems were obsolete, making it easy for telecom gateways to bypass the system without coming onto the regulator’s radar, the PTA official said.

PTA had installed and tested the new grey traffic monitoring equipment one month ago, the official said. Although it identified several illegal gateways this was the first case, since the installation of the new system that a licensed LDI operator was found involved in grey telephony traffic.

Explaining, the official said there are two types of gateways that terminate international calls in the country. The first type is licensed LDI operators who have legal mandate to terminate international calls in Pakistan while the other type is the illegal exchanges or gateways without a government license.

Although Wisecom had a license to terminate international calls, it was under-declaring its traffic by showing international minutes as local traffic, the official said, which leads to tax evasion.

The new system is working efficiently and has the ability to even remotely block illegal gateways, however if that doesn’t work, the authority then files complaint with FIA that conducts the raid on the offender’s offices, he said.

Earlier in October, Minister of State for Information and Technology Anusha Rehman directed PTA to block all illegitimate IPs being used for grey trafficking with the help of the new equipment.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 6^th, 2013.

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