The new guidelines named “Monitoring and Reconciliation of Telephony Traffic Regulations, 2009” will apply on all 14 LDI operators of various categories include fixed local loop, wireless and cellular phone operators particularly for recording calling traffic, billing and quality of LDI service.
Under these regulations, each LDI licensee and access providers shall establish the system on its own cost in accordance with these regulations as determined and required by the authority from time to time at the PTA designated premises.
All landing station and infrastructure licensee(s) shall establish a monitoring system with its interface to the regulator, on its own cost for the purpose of monitoring of telecommunication traffic (voice and data) within one hundred and twenty days of the notification of these regulations, it said.
Provided that the term collectively shall not include the mutual arrangement amongst LDI and access providers for deployment of the system but the PTA may allow deployment of such system collectively on the basis of a cost effective solution. The monitoring system of international calls traffic shall comprise the mandatory feature of monitoring and controlling grey traffic with the minimum of the following features and shall ensure compatibility to provide such information as required by the PTA.
The system should be capable to monitor, control, measure and record traffic in real-time; for complete signaling record, including but not limited for billing; for measuring accurately the quality of service.
A complete list of the Pakistani customers; and complete details of capacity leased by the licensee(s) to their customers should be recorded. The monitoring system(s) and the system(s) shall be capable of identifying, analysing and reconciling all data and voice signaling information in a clear and transparent manner for identification of the total traffic irrespective of the path taken in each direction by the traffic in such format and with such features as required by the PTA.
All circuit switched and packet switched networks shall have probes placed on all links carrying telephony traffic, the regulations further stated. The authority may provide the LDI licensee and access provider their relevant traffic details of communication through their networks, if deemed appropriate.
Operators shall ensure that signaling information is uncompressed, unencrypted, and not formatted in a manner which the installed monitoring system is unable to decipher using installed capabilities. They shall provide all information to regulator in original form and without any modifications, and information passed on should be readable by the installed probes in the manner prescribed by the PTA from time to time. Operators shall provide a scalable monitoring system to ensure modifications to meet the evolving policies, standards, formats, directions, rules and regulations of the PTA.
Draft Monitoring and Reconciliation of Telephony Traffic Regulations, 2009
