Ministry of IT holds interactive consultative sessions with stakeholders on new draft of telecom policy which was made available for views and comments earlier this month. Two day workshop (14-15 October) is being held at Hotel Margala Islamabad. The first day was attended by telecom operators, PTA, FAB and several other relevant stakeholders. All stakeholders showed contentment over the consultative process being adopted by the Ministry.

During the sessions, the international consultant engaged by the Ministry for the purpose presented salient features of the draft policy to the participants. These features include policy goals, licensing regime, market structure etc. Participants generated debates and raised various queries which were responded by the Ministry’s team and the consultant.

Minister of State for IT also attended one of the sessions and invited the participants to candidly provide their views to make the exercise objective and conclusive. She said that the policy review had already delayed by at least 5 years and therefore there was a need to complete the exercise of policy review as a priority while capturing all necessary policy interventions. She reiterated that the orientation of the policy is forward looking and supportive of upcoming technologies and services. The Minister viewed ‘accelerated digitization’ is the ultimate objective of the policy and the policy should smoothly take the sector towards convergence in coming 3-4 years.

The Minister took special interest in Voice over IP and Over the Top (OTT) services and specifically asked the participants to give their views on it.

After this workshop, the stakeholders will still get opportunity to submit their view/comments to the Ministry which will be duly considered.