Pakistan orders all illegal internet calls banned instantly
ISLAMABAD: Minister of State for Information Technology Anusha Rehman on Friday instructed that all illegal calls coming from abroad should be blocked without any further notice.
Chairing a review meeting of Grey Trafficking Monitoring attended by Dr Ismail Shah, Chairman, PTA, Akhlaq A Tarrar, Secretary IT, Azmat Ranjha, Additional Secretary IT, Anusha Rahman, directed that all companies authorised to bring international incoming calls to Pakistan be advised accordingly to get their IP addresses white listed by contacting PTA immediately.
White listing of IP addresses is required to authorise users/companies to use the services without any interruption.She further instructed If IP addresses were not reported to PTA for white listing as per prescribed procedure, they should be blocked without any notice. Moreover legal action should also be initiated against the companies involved in use of IP addresses for termination of any sort of illegal international incoming calls as per provision of laws.
During the meeting chairman, PTA informed that the newly deployed Grey Traffic Monitoring System, which started monitoring International Internet Protocol (IP) bandwidth to detect and block illegal International incoming voice calls have blocked some 42,000 IP addresses out of some 51,000 being used for this purpose by PTA in the past years.
In this context, all IP addresses which are not registered with PTA would be considered as black listed IPs and shall be blocked with immediate effect. IP addresses of authorised telecom users like International Clearing House (ICH), call centers and video conferencing etc are being white listed in the monitoring system.
It is to be mentioned here that government of Pakistan in its continuous efforts against blocking grey traffic, PTA with the help of FIA, has confiscated 711 Illegal Gateways during 112 raids. To curb down the menace of illegal traffic, with the efforts of ministry of IT, Grey Traffic Monitoring System (GMTS) was installed in October last. The grey monitoring system, operational since early October has the capability to automatically block those IPs which are not in the PTA’s white list.
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