PTCL DSL vs ISPs

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has announced a determination that deals with the complaints of Internet Service Providers of Pakistan with respect to PTCL’s recently launched Broadband Pakistan DSL services.

The determination:

1. has approved the ring-distance based charging by PTCL for metro circuits needed by DSL operators to carry their traffic from their DSLAMs back to their respective data centers but have asked PTCL to provide an SLA for the service which would be reviewed by the regulator
2. has denied the ISPs requests to be provided Ethernet connectivity between Exchanges instead of the current non-scalable nXE1 solution available to them
3. has approved the PTCL line-rent reduction from Rs 217/mo to Rs 150/mo direction future rate changes to be routed via the authority’s approval process
4. has fallen short of asking PTCL not to counter-offer the existing subscribers of the DSL providers and has advised the parties at arriving at a agreement as to how the providers should handle the DSL churn between themselves
5. has denied the ISPs’ plea to get access to the shiny new PTCL OFAN and has concluded that only the copper infrastructure of PTCL is up for sharing.
6. has instructed PTCL to let the operators bring in their copper pair to the PTCL premises to make use of the outside copper plant of PTCL.  Currently, PTCL has highly restrictive practices of not allowing interconnection between operators with each other one or both of whom happen to be co-located at PTCL premises.

The determination is being actively discussed at TGP here.