The attractive tariff packages with unlimited call offers and discounted minutes have helped generate a record national cellular mobile outgoing traffic of 294.2 billion minutes during year 2012-13. The cellular mobile national outgoing traffic to cellular network has shown a tremendous growth of 52.51% as compared to the same period of previous year 2011-12 in which 192.9 billion minutes were generated. Each passing year has been showing a reasonable growth as the total national cellular mobile outgoing traffic was only 76 billion minutes in 2009-10 and 137.7 billion minutes in 2010-11.
As per new figures issued by regulator Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the massive growth in national cellular mobile outgoing traffic was also contributed by new subscribers in the cellular network during the year and very attractive packages offered by cellular operators to win the subscribers from each other.
Lucrative cellular tariff packages with unlimited call offers and discounted minutes have become a major attraction for the cellular subscribers as the cellular mobile operators adopted aggressive promotional strategies offering attractive packages for Voice, Data and SMS, including free calls and unlimited SMS.
These marketing tactics resulted in more business for companies mainly from voice calls and SMS. Both the voice and SMS traffic has risen during the 2012-13 owing to bundled packages and SMS offers.
During 2012-13, a record 315.7 billion SMSs were exchanged by the mobile consumers, showing an increase of 13.68% from previous year, though the growth rate is lower than corresponding period of previous year but the total figure of SMS exchanged is impressive.
The figures further showed that the national outgoing traffic from mobile to fixed networks remained very low as compared to traffic from mobile to mobile networks. This was mainly due to low tariffs being offered on the same network by operators as well as the huge difference in cellular and fixed line subscriber numbers.
The international outgoing traffic from cellular network has also witnessed a gradual increase and shown a healthy growth of 17.92% by June 2013 contrary to sharp decline of 28.69% for the same period of 2011-12.
The international incoming traffic on cellular networks somewhat declined and showed a negative trend of 10.02% for the year 2012-13 as compared to the year 2010-11. The decrease in international incoming traffic could be due to increase in Access Promotion Contribution (APC) change during 2012-13 from 1.25 US cents to 2.90 US cents, which discouraged Long Distance International (LDI) operators to offer lower settlement rates to attract additional incoming traffic in the country.
In August 2012, Ministry of IT issued a policy directive to establish one international gateway for international incoming traffic to Pakistan which resulted in an increase of international call rates for international incoming traffic to Pakistan and a drop in the traffic has been witnessed.
The voice and SMS ratio per subscriber per month has also notably improved as average cellular mobile subscriber in Pakistan,is making voice calls of 203 minutes per month whereas, generating 214 SMS.
An incredible growth of 43.97% in voice traffic average per user has been witnessed while growth of 7% in SMS use per subscriber was noted during the period.
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