State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority is doing great in its 668 Campaign to wipe-off illegal SIMs, but what about the illegal mobile handsets? When I say illegal cell phones, it means cell phones without a valid IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity usually China made.

The operators in India have reportedly blocked 25 million such handsets on orders of the Department of Telecommunication. After susscessful 668, PTA should have this on its hit-list.

News item from The Nation gives the following details:

A significant quantity of Chinese-made handsets are available in Pakistan that come without valid International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) that has posed serious threats to the national security as such phones have allegedly been used by the terrorists.

It was found that the lack of unique IMEI numbers has made it impossible to detect the suspected calls from a specific handset. It was further learnt that IMEI series allocation happens only in hardware type approval.

Moreover, these Chinese handsets are fully functional, however, they lack IMEI programming because Chinese manufacturers are usually not registered companies thus no IMEI range is allocated to them.

The government of Pakistan has yet not initiated any plan to combat this issue. On the other hand Indian media has reported that as many as 25 million Chinese handsets were blocked in India which were available in the market without valid IMEI numbers. It was reported that the move came after The Department of Telecommunications, India (DoT) had instructed the operators to block cell phones without a valid IMEI number.

In this regard several phone sellers have confirmed that the Chinese handsets are usually the duplicates of branded phones. These mobile phones are without IMEI numbers which are typically low-end handsets manufactured by the small Chinese phone manufacturers who cut their costs by skipping the IMEI programming stage.

They were of the view that cellular companies and manufacturers in the country are heeding to adopt the prerequisites in this regard but they have yet to streamline mobile connection ownership issues.

“Let’s not expect any super natural thing in Pakistan regarding this in near future,” commented an official. He further said that the cellular operators in India had offered such subscribers to either discard their handsets or bring them to official outlets of cellular companies to re-programme their IMEI numbers.