Naveed Saeed talks about important issues of PTCL

Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited’s Senior Executive Vice President Commercial Naveed Saeed gave an interview to Pakistan Today. He told about the past achievements and the future plans of his company, PTCL, as well as he also talked about the challenges that his company faced at different fronts. According to him, the privatization of PTCL gave a phenomenal growth to company due to which it has become a market leader in data services besides becoming the market leader in telecommunication industry of Pakistan. At the moment, PTCL is thinking about buying other telecom operators in order to increase its presence and weight in Pakistani market. Since its inception, the company has deployed hundreds of millions of dollars for improving its data network cables across the country. PTCL has become the back haul of internet connectivity in Pakistan and it is providing internet connectivity to the big institution of corporate entities and banks. The company is determined to deploy the latest technologies all over the country in order to increase the efficiency of its business. At the domestic front, where in past maximum speeds of internet connectivity were limited to 256kbps, now the internet connectivity through DSL is being served at up to 100Mbps. The growth in PTCL’s broadband base is ranked the fifth fastest in all broadband service providers of world. Even in wireless connectivity, this company is providing latest CDMA 1X technology through which high speed internet can be easily accessed. Additionally, the PTCL launched the high data speed EVDO Red B this year; it was the first deployment of EVDO Red B technology all over the world. Overall, PTCL’s last six years have passed very well. In order to continue the same speed of progress, the company has hired new professionals other than training its old staff. It has re engineered itself in a different way so that it can keep its lead as the market leader. As far as challenges are concerned that PTCL faced in the past, Naveed Saeed said, that earlier, the fixed line connections of his company had decreased due to the global transfer trend towards the wireless technologies. But this decrease was marginal in PTCL as compared to the other countries. He added that the decrease then ended because the high speed internet connectivity was possible through the fixed line connections only. The services such as broadband and IPTV helped the company in boosting its fixed line user database. The PSTN voice revenues of his company grew due to the new bundle offers. If Pakistan is compared with the other countries such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Iran then it is far ahead of them in telecom sector. DSL service, which was launched just three years ago in Pakistan, has increased very much and the higher bandwidth prices have also become affordable to a large population. At a time when the 32GB memory exists even on the mobile devices, it is likely that the desire for faster internet connections, even in DSL, will increase. Thus, PTCL, which already owns the 95% of the broadband’s subscriber base in Pakistan, will invest more in order to cater to the needs of its customers. The company is already planning to start 4G in Pakistan. He further said that the company administration was satisfied with the telecom watchdog. The grey area impression about PTCL’s customer care department was not correct. The customer’s complaints are resolved within 24 hours after registration. But he accepted that due to some gaps, the department could not work properly. For example, in the big cities like Lahore, the other government departments without informing the PTCL do massive diggings due to which the underground cables are broken. The problems caused in this way are here to stay but they are not of big scale. He added that PTCL had changed its complaint registration system and it was regularly checked by examiners; besides further improvements were being brought in this system.