PTCL 'package'

Editorial -- Express Tribune (coming out soon in the market)


What is one to make of PTCL’s new ‘one rupee one minute’ package which is being heavily advertised on television and newspapers these days? According to the new tariffs, calls can be made nationwide at the rate of a rupee a minute – and this is a good thing given that not too long ago calling Lahore from Karachi (and vice versa) would cost more than 10 times that. The deception – and PTCL seems to be an expert at that comes in the fine print and if one had read the advertisement closely they would have noticed that the one-rupee-per-minute rate applies to local calls as well. This basically means that PTCL has quietly more than doubled its local call charges – and local calls make up the bulk of its total calling traffic. Prior to this, a local call cost a little over two rupees for every five minutes and with the new ‘package’ a five minute call will cost five rupees, or more than double! In all this, one can only wonder what exactly is the industry regulator – the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority – doing given that one of its primary responsibilities is to protect the interests of telephone users. One example of what can only be called collusion between it and PTCL can be found on the latter’s website which has a link to the PTA website on it!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Banned Indian channel the most watched on Pakistani cable TV

Yes you read that right -- Star Plus, the Indian television channel otherwise banned in Pakistan, but presumably available in most parts of the country, is the most-watched channel on cable television. In fact, it leads the next most-watched channel, Geo News, by such a wide margin that more people watch Star Plus than the next four channels on the ratings list. Not only that, the top five also includes two other banned Indian channels, Sony and Colors. Lest people be suspicious of where I'm getting all this from, this is in fact in the public realm, thanks to brandsynario.com, a Pakistani marketing and advertising website, which has posted the results of an exhaustive survey by Media Logic detailing the viewing habits of Pakistanis for 2010. Media Logic is incidentally the same company that does market research and ratings for the industry and hence its findings are normally taken at face value and accepted by all the channels. There are two ratings lists that are of interest. The
Read more

Mysterious plane spotted at Karachi airport

Image
Yesterday had to make a quick dash to Lahore -- Took a PIA flight at 3 pm -- the plane reversed from the gate and was slowly taxiing to the beginning of the runway -- and i have a habit of looking out of the window as much as i can -- and i saw one of the PAF sheds on one side -- you can tell from its camouflage colours -- and in front of it were three unmarked jets -- with very few windows -- they did not have any tail design or colour -- one however had a blue and red marking on the fuesalage and it said 'meridian' -- saw the same plane when i got back to Karachi later that night. The plane that I saw is kind of identical to the one shown in the picture here. The issue is that it's not a military plane but a private one and hence the question arises that what is it doing at Karachi airport. (Juxtapose this with a well-researched and detailed report by Jeremy Scahill that appeared in The Nation in November 2009 of the presence of US private contractors in Karachi hired by
Read more

What is an Indian FM channel doing in Karachi???!!

yes you read it right -- last night while driving to do an errand i turned on the radio and came across an FM channel where the host was talking in what appeared to be Gujarati -- initially i thought it was perhaps a new channel in gujarati -- apna karachi 107 FM has a segment in Gujarati i believe as well so perhaps someone took the initiative to cater to karachi's sizeable gujarati-speaking population. However, this morning again, as I was checking various FM channels, I came across the same one -- 93.5 FM -- with a man and a woman both talking in a mixture of what seemed to be urdu, English and Gujarati -- the songs were all indian but that doesnt necessarily mean that the channel would be indian because many pakistani FM channels also air Indian songs -- but then came an ad for Bisleri which is India's leading mineral water provider -- Bisleri is not sold in Pakistan so the ad couldnt be for Karachi -- and then it made sense -- this was clearly an FM channel coming from the
Read more