Mobile services blackout: Post-paid users forced to pay for ‘national security’

Billed subscribers will pay their monthly line rent in full.

KARACHI:

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This, perhaps, best defines the Ministry of Interior’s most favoured counter-terrorism strategy: suspension of cellular services.

Post-paid package subscribers, it seems, were not taken into consideration at all by the ministry as it decided to suspend cellular services for more than 40 hours ahead of Ashura.

The ministry’s directives pertaining to suspension of mobile networks are meant exclusively for prepaid customers, but post-paid customers – who apparently pose no threat to national security – nonetheless face the grind. Ironically, neither the telecom operators nor the government is going to compensate post-paid subscribers, who will pay their monthly line rent in full without actually availing services for the entire month.

Even worse, because the government seems to enjoy using the same tactic on almost every important occasion, post-paid subscribers are expected to continue to suffer the same way. Bear in mind that the government does admit that post-paid customers are not a threat: it just shifts the blame for their suffering on technological limitations.

“Owing to the higher integrity of user data, the post-paid segment does not pose a significant security threat,” Farooq Awan, chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), acknowledged while responding to The Express Tribune’s queries.

Awan said that the ministry’s instructions primarily relate to the prepaid segment – PTA’s directives, however, do not mention what to do with post-paid subscribers.

“As far as the blocking of cellular services is concerned, technically no discrimination between post- and prepaid segments is possible,” Awan said.

Like the country’s telecommunications regulator, cellular mobile operators (CMOs), too, have washed their hands of any responsibility.

“There is no technology in the world that can provide exclusive network services to post-paid consumers and restrict signals to prepaid subscribers,” a telecom source said. “Suspending cellular services was not the industry’s initiative,” he said in defence; adding that “If someone should compensate, it should be the government.”



Asked if the government should compensate post-paid subscribers for the recent outages, the PTA chairman said there is no law that provisions for compensation in such circumstances.

The majority of post-paid subscribers, according to telecom sources, are corporate sector clients as well as small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) – some of the most important segments of the economy. When CMOs switched off their radar towers on November 23, 24 and 25, these subscribers faced tangible difficulties due to the cellular blackout.

Post-paid consumers, according to PTA and telecom sources, account for 2% (2.5 million) of Pakistan’s 120 million mobile subscribers. The industry’s average revenue per user (ARPU) is about $2.5 or Rs237, which comes down to Rs8 per day. The ARPU for the post-paid segment, according to sources, is four times the industry ARPU, or Rs32 a day. This adds up to Rs77 million a day for 2.4 million post-paid subscribers – the minimum amount they will end up paying at the end of the current billing month without actually availing the services they will be charged for.

However, that amount looks small when compared with lost taxes to the tune of Rs300 million. It pales in comparison if one considers the Rs1 billion in revenues cellular operators lost during the outages.

The government seems content with its strategy: it has blocked cellular services on five different occasions this year alone. The CMOs are currently considering legal options – primarily because they are getting increasingly miffed by the millions lost in revenues on every occasion.

However, the common consumer – whose money has made the Pakistani telecom sector a vibrant industry and one of the main sources of revenue for the national exchequer – seems to have been shunted aside for now. This holds most true for post-paid users – the generally brand-loyal customers who will have to pay for services they never received.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 30^th, 2012.