Articles of September 2009

The times have changed and having cell phone is no more a luxury. Today, the mobile phone has marked its place in the list of basic commodities. No matter which class you belong to or which age group your are from, you can find one for yourself in the market with a very nominal price. At present, majority of the population living in big cities is enjoying landline facility; all these factors are an obvious indicator of telecom growth in the country. The last few years have witnessed a tremendous development in telecom sector as the overall teledensity of the country has reached 61.8%. With such a boom in the growth of telecom subscribers, it becomes a challenge for telecom operators as well as the Regulator to assure the provision of quality services to such a huge consumer base and satisfy their needs. Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), as Regulator of the sector, guarantees the protection of telecom consumers' rights by setting strict quality measures for the operators. PTA is making every effort to facilitate the consumers and its recent initiatives are evident to this claim.

Realizing consumers' interests and their rights, PTA formed a Consumer Complaint Cell to handle their complaints. Initially this Cell was working in a limited capacity. The escalating consumer base had put the number of complaints on rise and due to the introduction of new services by operators the nature of consumer complaints also got diversified. The previous complaint handling mechanism was not effective enough to tackle with such situation. There was an acute need for a new enhanced complaint handling system. The Authority, after analyzing the situation, revamped its Complaint Cell