Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has formed a Committee headed by Member (Technical) PTA, Dr. Khawar Siddique Khokhar to analyze situation that arose after Mobilink’s outage on Sunday.
This was mentioned in a statement issued by the authority.
Statement said that DG (Enforcement), DG (Licensing) and DG (Law) at PTA are also part of this committee that is likely to prepare a report based on facts gathered during their visit to Mobilink’s office to formulate a way for better crisis management during any such events in future.
Mobilink’s in-house investigation on incident will also be made part of this report.
The Committee is deliberating further action on the issue from all technical and legal aspects and how such incidents can be prevented in future, said the statement.
According to Daily Times, Mobilink’s outage was also discussed in senate’s standing committee meeting for IT and Telecom. Paper said that committee has directed the regulator to take action against the company by imposing fine and/or arranging compensation for the customers.
We are not sure of any possible fine imposition on Mobilink, however, after our conversations with multiple PTA officials, it looks that Mobilink may end up paying something to each customer as a compensation – but again, there’s nothing decided so far at authority’s headquarter, its something that’s just on the PTA’s cards for now.
After this incident, and other relating fire eruptions in past, PTA is looking into its options to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. For this, according to our sources, authority may regulate to make it necessary for all operators to maintain backups of all core-infrastructure equipment, also termed as disaster recovery setup.
Aamir Bahi – Please also look into other cellular and internet companies back up plans.
I doubt if they have one
Hmmm. Interesting news. This should be something that PTA would have ensured long time back for all operators. Were they waiting to open their eyes only after fire accidents happen to come up with the idea of having DRS. Stupid PTA people.
As for Mobilink, i think they did a marvellous job in restoring their services and keep updating of status of services restored. this is how all companies should react in a matter of crisis.
Lets hope that this never happens for any operator may it be Mobilink, Ufone, Telenor, Zong or Warid.
It took Mobilink 16-20 hours to restore the service, whats marvelous about that?
And if PTA people are stupid, then Mobilink people are much more stupid to have not done any disaster prevention and recovery measures for their own network.
They should be fine as well as customers should be compensated. Mobilink should also fire some top executives who are sitting at the top and not making any DR plan. They should launch apologetic campaign to the affectees as well, rather running a Jazba campaign.
The authority on the other hand should not act after the incidents happen and sleep on before it.
Rather they should remain pro-active and get up from their seats to improve this industry as whole.
I haven’t seen anything done by the Authority appreciable after the previous Mushraf’s govt.
Few suggestions:
The Mobile operators should have the following DR plans.
1. They should have a DR site
2. They should not only have a DR site but also a redundant operator like Zong, Telenor or Ufone to whom they shift the traffic if something like this happened.
@Ammir,
I hope this comment will not be deleted as my previous comment was deleted by the Admin on the relevant Mobilink topic.
im sorry but thats just wierd…how does running a jazba campaign have anything to do with a fire breaking out??:S also, are u suggesting all telcos manage their load, plus have a buffer limit JUST IN CASE a competitor breaks down?? not sounding all that practical are we??
Well frankly, i believe that accidents can happen anywhere at anytime,but yes we should be more careful. Yet no one is to be blamed. We should just pray that nothing like this happens again.
Regarding the compensation, if Mobilink can compensate to all its customers, sure that is great, but if it doesn’t its great nonetheless because they fixed the network issue in just half a day! which is quite surprising especially for the citizens of Pakistan! Who knew we could rely on some one in our country!
I just wanted to know that how many of us have said these things against our poor Govt for which everyone of us is suffereing day-by-day either through hard and soft losses.
Who asked Govt to compansante you peoples against these losses… ???
We daily suffer because of bad policies because of bad goverance because of our politicians but we never ever have urge to asked them.
Lets think to be a strong nation first and after that all things will be automatically in our controls.
Just make yourself right and ask yourself first that who has been suffered from you in a day and have u ever compansate him/her ???
Think Possitive …. And be a NATION.
@RealFace,
I did and I regularly go in the Civil society protest at the Jinnah Avenue and we raise our voice. Last week we did a protest against the issue of Raymond Davis on which our government is sleeping and just doing nothing.
I request all of you to come out in these peace full demonstrations in addition to your blog activities.
unless someone died due to outage of the service, there is absolutely no point in handing out compensation money. Although no one bothers to read the license agreement on acquiring the service yet one should know that they did not signup for 24/7 guaranteed service.
On the lighter note mobilink should compensate by giving its customers foc sim of anyother operator of choice as a backup if anything goes wrOng with their service in future :p
i cant see PTA being of much value here. this is more of a case of not having anything to do so they want to interfere.
I am sure they will trump up some bogus charges or come up with some stupid policy that will cause cash strapped operators to protest.
work on 3G instead of pissing on fires that have already gone out
In My opinion PTA is doing great work to regulate. I don’t think Any cellular company have any backup including PTCL.
I agree with pappu..
There is no need for compensation. I mean the loss was majorly for Mobilink as they are the ones who incurred damage to their infrastructure.
Yes we were not able to contact our friends and family, but that was due to a genuine case. I think every Mobilink customer should understand what happened..
Sarah since your uncle owns Mobilink so we agree that you don’t need compensation. But please have a softer side for poor people like us who don’t have money to waste like you.
[Comment Edited]
well said pappu n sarah :)
Haha :)
no action wil be taken.PTA
money lay kr chup hojayegi
Could you please tell me that what action PTA have taken against PTCL. They are providing pathetic services to customers. What type of penalties they imposed on PTCL.
It’s the responsibility of regulator to treat equally but in my opinion PTA is not playing good role. I cannot say that they are taking money from operators as mentioned by zeeshan but this is just because of management issue. Thanks God new chairman of PTA is from PTA and not outsider as previous one.
Could you please tell me what type of penalties PTA imposed on PTCL when the customers were down just because of strike of workers and the CEO of PTCL went abroad instead of involving himself to resolve these matters?
Anyways hope for the best….. :)
This is a joke. The standing committee on IT and PTA don’t take notice of things of national concern such as:
WHY THE HELL IS THERE NO 3G in PAKISTAN TILL NOW!!!
And they are taking of a cellular operators problem (for which there are many alternatives such as Telenor, Ufone, Zong and Warid!). Customer have no choice but to be stuck with ancient 2G technology and we are talking of DR. Way to go PTA.
Koi jani nuksaan nahe hua to fine b nahe hona chahhiye
agreed with sarah!
Accidents happen everywhere yaar! It’s not something new. We should thank god that there was no loss of human life and everyone was safe
yaar, i think pta should be helping mobilink for the loss.
accidents like these have been happening with other cellular companies too in the past. and in this case, the issue was fixed overnight.
we, and specially pta should support mobilink in recovering any losses that might have occurred.
love you mobilink! and this incident made me love you even more! :)
After this incident, i truly felt loyal to my celluar service provider. i.e. Mobilink!
Yar itni jaldi issue fix ho gaya. Kamal hai!
Aur phir bhi log naraz ho rahay hain?
yar aik din ki baat thi.. hamari duniya mei bohat kuch ho jata hai..
Jane bhi do mobilink ko aur shukariya kaho mobilink ko keh aag keh baad un nei hamara network inti jaldi theek kar diya
Itni jaldi??
16 hours is jaldi??
R u living in stone-age or working for Mobilink?
And mobilink won’t just be your service provider, it would be your employer, otherwise what sense does it make to feel loyal to a service provider on an outage caused by their own fault??
You are right Sarah, every Mobilink customer should ‘understand’ the matter at hand!
well said..
Can anyone estimates the loss that Mobilink bear under this network outage?
I have been told by inside sources that it was a Huawei technician whose carelessness or in-experience-ness caused the fire (Huawei being the vendor for Mobilink’s CORE Network).
More than anything, this should open the eyes of the Chinese vendors, who treat that employees very badly and try to kick them out of the company after 2-3 years as the employees start expecting respect and higher salary after working for 2-3 years.
So instead of giving them this, Chinese employers kick them out and hire new in-experiences persons at very low salary.
This fire and the ensuing loss was a direct result of Chinese Employees HR policies.
HUawei is a pathetic company in all respects, they dont give due rest to the employees. What they give is pressure and restlessness. Huawei should compensate Mobilink and its subscribers. HW is a very clever and cunning company. They might have taken money from other operators for doing this. Jobs are often outsourecd to minnows and they employ very young, inexperienced and incapable staff paying less salaries. Huawei has outsourced most of its staff hence no obligations on employee welfare and any day can wind-up the business.
‘insider truth teller’: i think i’ve heard about stuff like this even before and i kind of believe in your point.
hr policies is an integral factor for any company to run smoothly.
mobilink is suuuuper organized as far as i know so they are not to blame.
i have actually started loving mobilink even more after these meanless criticisms from people about the network.
MOBILINK, YOU ARE AMAAAZING!! :)
people, please stop complaining, as far as i know it wasn’t even mobilink’s fault!!