LAHORE: As the position of the five telecom operators has remained unchanged after the biometric verification of SIMs, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority is ‘reluctant’ to disclose the number of SIMs each of them blocked.

“Ranking of the mobile companies has not changed and it is the same as was before start of the biometric verification system (BVS) exercise,” the PTA responded to Dawn’s query but it didn’t disclose the number of blocked SIMs by each operator before a third-party audit.

“The data of blocked SIMs will be provided to the auditors for verification and after that it will be shared with media,” the PTA said, adding after completion of the re-verification process, the updated data had also been obtained and was being analysed.

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“Mobile companies have undertaken the audit twice. A complete audit of mobile subscribers’ data is also being planned,” it said.

To a question about the government’s satisfaction of this ‘marathon’ BVS exercise, the PTA said: “It is satisfied with the exercise and so are the interior ministry and the law-enforcement agencies.”

According to sources, the PTA is reluctant to disclose the number of SIMs each firm blocked after the BVS on the request of some of them (operators).

“Making the number of each operator’s blocked SIMs public may have a bad impact on some of the operators in such a competitive market,” a source said.

According to PTA 2014 annual report, telecom sector continued to grow despite slow growth in other sectors of the economy. Mobile penetration has reached 76.6 per cent with 139.9 million subscribers at the end of June 2014. Mobile companies managed to add 11.04 million new subscribers with 9.1 per cent growth during 2014.

“Mobilink leads the market with 27.7 per cent subscriber share followed by Telenor (26.1 per cent), Zong (19.4 per cent), Ufone (17.4 per cent) and Warid (9.3 per cent). Cellular cell sites have increased to 37,576 covering more than 92 per cent of the land area of Pakistan. The national traffic from cellular to cellular mobile networks has increased by 40 per cent while 301.7 billion SMS were exchanged over cellular networks during the financial year of 2014,” the report said.

The PTA further said a total of 20 million active SIMs had been blocked (by first week of last month).

“However, these SIMs can be unblocked by respective subscribers after biometric verification as per procedure. Therefore, the count keeps on changing on a daily basis,” it said.

Published in Dawn, June 1st, 2015

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