In a blatant display of double-standards, if any Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) subscriber lodges a complaint against their services to Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the complaint is mostly ignored or taken up after a considerable duration has passed. On the other hand, PTA reacts in a much vigilant fashion if the complaint is against any of the cellular service providers in the country.

Of around 1.1 million fixed-line telephones in Karachi, thousands are lying dead while thousands more are malfunctioning for months and despite complaints to relevant PTCL authorities and even to PTA, no action has been taken to rectify the faults, PTCL’s fixed-phone subscribers told The News.

One of the worst areas with respect to telecommunication facilities are Gulistan-e-Jauhar and Gulshan-e-Hadeed where fixed-line phones remain dead for months and often the subscribers are compelled to abandon the PTCL facilities and switch to cellular-phone services.

“My phone is lying dead since January and despite complaining to all relevant authorities and moving from pillar to post, nothing has happened. Once, my family paid Rs. 500 to a lineman and the phone line was restored but within few weeks the line went dead again,” said Nasir, a resident of Gulistan-e-Jauhar.

According to him, he submitted applications to not only the concerned divisional engineer (DE) of the Gulistan-e-Jauhar exchange but also to the General Manager(GM) of the concerned region and to the Executive Vice President (EVP), but to no avail.

Another subscriber, who is a doctor by profession, said that fixed-line telephone was a necessity for him since he could not use his cell-phone at his hospital. The only option left for him to remain connected with his family in Gulistan-e-Jauhar was via a PTCL landline, which it was lying dead for many months.

“The performance of PTCL reminds us of the days when it was in government control and there were no cellular companies in the market. Despite being a private company now, the PTCL authorities are providing worst kind of service to its subscribers,” he charged and urged the PTCL high-ups to look into the problem immediately.

Officials in the PTCL revealed that during the last three to four months, at least eight DEs of Gulistan-e-Jauhar telephone exchange had been replaced to improve the quality of service but the problem could not be rectified.

An official of the PTCL revealed on condition of anonymity that actually there were no permanent general managers (Operations and Maintenance) at two of the three PTCL regions in Karachi. “Two GMs have been given the additional charge of Operations and Maintenance in regions I & II, which is causing such problems,” he disclosed.

The PTCL official claimed that the company has a permanent fault management system which records the complaints and after repairing, they give a rectification report to high-ups. However, at present the local PTCL authorities were giving “all correct” report to senior officials without rectifying the complaints.

He further disclosed that PTCL’s internal staff was also involved in deliberately cutting the underground cables whose restoration usually takes a few days. In some cases money was demanded from the affected subscribers.

“Owing to poor service and delays in rectifying faults, more and more PTCL subscribers are switching to cell phones,” he claimed.

On the other hand, subscribers using PTCL’s V-phone (wireless phone) say that they often face hurdles in Internet connectivity in daytime, while calls are not received on V-phone when they don’t have credit in their phones.

The PTCL had announced that no line-rent would be charged on V-phone but later the subscribers were compelled to take one of three packages and in all of them line-rent is deducted on a daily basis.

When contacted, Executive Vice President (South) PTCL Rahmatullah Khan said that GM Coordination (Karachi) Waqar Hafiz should be approached for his comments in this regard. However, despite repeated attempts he did not answer his phone.

A PTA official from Islamabad, however, said that being a regulatory authority PTA takes action on subscribers’ complaints without any discrimination and all complaints were forwarded to the concerned cellular-phone firms as well as PTCL for immediate redressal.

“It is an assumption that PTCL doesn’t look into subscribers’ complaints forwarded by the PTA as it is simply not possible. We have complete data of how many complaints against the PTCL were lodged with us and how many of them were redressed in how much time,” he maintained.