PTA Committee Formed to Look into Mobilink’s Outage

PTA Committee Formed to Look into Mobilink’s Outage

By Aamir Attaa · Tuesday, Mar 8, 2011

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.