PTA and FIA conduct raids without probe
KARACHI: The Association of Call Centres Association (ACCO) has flayed the raid conducted by Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) and Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA) on the office of Cogilent Solutions, Islamabad, on the pretext of practising illegal VoIP termination. According to details, the officials entered the office of Cogilent Solutions, Software Technology Park, Islamabad, and seized all their servers, mobiles and other equipment. They also locked up the CEO of the company behind bars. According to reports, the joint team of PTA and FIA raided the wrong place. In the FIR of FIA, IP address 203.99.57.224/29 was mentioned that was not used by Cogilent, which was using 203.33.57.232/29.
The FIA/PTA team raided wrong place without proper investigation and due diligence and arrested fair people destroying their reputation and credibility, said ACCO President Abdullah Butt. He said that termination of international calls through VoIp required either connectivity with PSTN or GSM gateway. Cogilent’s office had only four phone lines from PTCL including one being used for fax. No commercial termination of calls could take place on these four lines. PTCL would also have record of these outgoing calls and they could easily find out whether CLIs of these calls were recorded/displayed at any number while terminating international calls, he said. Besides, no GSM gateway was found in Cogilent’s office, thus no GSM/PSTN connectivity was established with VoIP.
All previous such raids found PSTN/GSM gateways connected with IP but Cogilent had nothing of this sort. Butt lamented that PTA had been silent on famous illegal call terminations of hundreds of millions of minutes by NTC for more than two years, despite the hue and cry in the media, PTA could not dare raid NTC premises. “PTCL has been doing the same, bringing 40-50 million minutes of underhand grey traffic every month. PTA knows this and we have publicly pointed this out in a meeting of PTA, PTCL and industry and this was recorded in the minutes of the meeting. But PTA did not dare raid ITMC, RWP, confiscate switch and arrest the accused,” Butt said. This step has damaged all efforts of promoting Pakistan’s call centre industry, he remarked.
Source: B/Recorder
Date:12/16/2006
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