WHEN A PHONE RINGS ON YOUR CELL PHONE, the call silently bypasses the switch board and the number that appears on the CLI is either a local number or a mobile number. This sounds pretty innocuous but this causes local telecom industry a massive loss of at-least 916.6 million US$ every year.

A vast majority of Pakistanis living abroad call Pakistan frequently and, to avoid real charges they have to pay for international calls, they choose cheap and most of the time unlicensed carriers. The traffic which they terminate in Pakistan comes through illegal and unlicensed sources such as small exchanges which operate on mobile SIMs, WLL and land lined numbers. Calls coming from such sources bypass international gateway and hence skips termination charges required for international calls.

Grey traffic is a global concern. The problem also cropped up in India when illegal calls caused a huge damage to the country's economy. Indian government realized that in order to stop grey trafficking, they had to lower their charges for an international call that gets terminated in India and by doing so they to some extent succeeded in minimizing grey traffic from their country.

The biggest route for illegal termination is from UK to Mexico and almost every calling card in UK offers its services on VoIP due to low cost Internet there.

There used to be a monopoly for years in international traffic termination in Pakistan but then in 1997 NTC (National Telecommunication Cooperation) a government owned Telecom Company got the license to operate its international gateway in Pakistan for the very first time. NTC partnered with Catalyst Communications (a privately owned and Islamabad based telecom company) which started operations in Pakistan. This helped in reduction of grey operators along-with generation of huge income to the government sector.
Government of Pakistan is doing a great job in curbing grey traffic. The government authorities in coordination with PTCL, PTA and law enforcement agencies frequently acted upon to crack down illegal exchanges in Pakistan. It is not an easy job as 'grey traffic' is one of those lucrative businesses in which you can earn more than four time you earn in terminating white traffic in Pakistan but that doesn't make it legal in any way.

The government has also blocked some voice ports except for people who are terminating international traffic or call centers in Pakistan but even then many international calls coming to Pakistan still show a local number. All the stakeholders of Pakistan's telecom industry should come up with a joint strategy to cope with grey traffic as in one way or the other it hurts every licensed carrier of the country.

I hope that this article helped in bringing awareness about grey traffic. The next time when you receive an international call and you find either no number, private caller or a local number blinking on your screen, you would know by what means this call is being terminated at your end.

The writer is a student of Computer Engineering at Bahria University, Islamabad. He is also working for Catcom (Pvt) Ltd.
He can be reached at ran@catcomntc.com.