Optimizing financial parameters to disincentivise international grey traffic and rationalization of measures to curb illegal international telephony in Pakistan

In this paper an effort is made to bring into notice the amount of grey traffic entering in Pakistan. Pakistan Telecommunications Authority's current efforts are also reviewed in regard to control of illegal practices. Moreover review and correlation of the Approved Settlement Rates and the international traffic entering Pakistan from 2005 to 2009 is studied. The approach adopted for estimation of Grey Traffic is partly based upon the international traffic data collected from relevant agencies as well as primary data collected through a survey. The analysis undergoes necessary observations, tests, and calculations inferences to arrive at realistic and logical outcomes. Secondly the data collected form relevant agencies has also been analyzed on different modes of interpretation as part of my research. Each variable including ASR (Approved Settlement Rates), APC for LL (Access Promotion Contribution for Local Loop), APC for USF (Access Promotion Contribution for Universal Service Fund), MTR (Mobile Termination Rate) and LDI share (Long Distance International Share), contributing towards international traffic has been graphically analyzed on fairly long span of time. The theoretical derivation arrived at, in the study has also been augmented by another angle of looking at the problem i.e. through trend analysis. The study brought out very interesting findings which have been appropriately discussed where applicable in the documentation. Few of these observations include that legal traffic is inversely proportional to APC, meaning that with the increasing APC there is a proportionate decline in the legal traffic. Similarly with the decreasing trend of APC, the legal traffic proportionately increases. This suggests that APC needs to be optimized in such a way that without sacrificing the need of purpose for which it is generated, a limit is placed on it such that does not encourage grey traffic.