By Ali Imran
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) for the last one year since March 2020 has been continuously supplementing Government’s efforts to contain COVID-19 through various means from sending cautionary SMSs to setting up awareness ringtones. Two billion coronavirus awareness messages have so far been sent since 19th March 2020 in Urdu, English and regional languages to mobile users across Pakistan. Awareness SMSs have also been sent to suspected persons who may have come into contact with coronavirus patients during travelling. More than 1.036 million cautionary messages have been sent to travelers and suspected persons. Furthermore, Corona Awareness Ring Back Tones (RBTs) have been activated on 131.7 million subscribers’ mobile devices.
PTA also successfully mobilized the telecom sector to carry out activities required to maintain performance and services. To ensure that Pakistan stays connected, PTA immediately analyzed international & national bandwidth peak trends & capacity, and engaged all operators for capacity upgrades, load balancing and traffic optimization. The telecom operators, especially Cellular Mobile Operators (CMOs) played a commendable role for their outright support in handling this global emergency of unprecedented scale. Operators increased data allowances and offered discounted bundles & packages (additional data and on-net voice minutes) to facilitate users. Efforts were undertaken to quickly expand the network to areas devoid of broadband coverage (fixed line and mobile). Furthermore, to facilitate operations of educational institutions, and businesses etc., 745 IPs have been whitelisted since July 2020 whereas 2968 Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have been registered. PTA also allocated 16 different short codes and 6 UAN (Toll Free) numbers to Government entities working on controlling the pandemic.
