Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) is having talks with broadband operators to address the issue of offering lesser than advertised bandwidth, while charging full amount from the customers.
Sources told ProPakistani that the planning and development department of the authority is taking up the prolonged issue the subscriber faces of receiving reduced bandwidth against the amount they pay for the packages.
It has been learnt that a very common problem of the subscriber is that they don’t get the complete bandwidth against the charges they pay, and almost all the broadband providers in the country don’t provide advertised bandwidth to their subscribers.
The industry experts in this regard say it is the shared bandwidth the end user gets and that is largely dependent on the volume of traffic, like if the traffic is high during the peak hours, customers face service quality issues.
Sources at the PTA informed that technically the operators are allowed to multiply their E-1 (a basic unit of 2MB under the rules and regulations of international optical fiber) ten times, meaning that they can sell their 2MB package to 10 people under the shared agreement. The cost of one E-1 is not less than two thousand dollars, therefore, it is really costly for the common subscriber to get a dedicated 2MB connection.
Moreover, the whole communication industry works under the phenomenon of ‘probability’, which means the broadband service providers distribute the bandwidth on the conditions of probability to its subscribers.
This can best be illustrated by an example that if an operator gives its 2MB connection to 10 subscribers, it knows that not all the subscribers would be online – hence they start sharing the pipe with more than 10 subscribers. But when all of them get online, in parallel, issue of reduced bandwidth occurs and the subscriber faces the low bandwidth, they said.
Industry experts believe that internet is still slow and unreliable in the country, and the whole industry all over the world is getting more and more bandwidth hungry.
