Saudi Government to monitor VoIP communications

Saudi Government seems more determined than ever to monitor and control Voice over IP (VoIP) activities being done through applications like Viber, Skype and Whatsapp. Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC), the telecom regulator of Saudi Arabia has declared on its website that VoIP services such as these are breaking Saudi regulatory laws. The authority informed the licensed telecom providers to work with developers of these services and make sure that they comply with the Saudi regulatory laws, though CITC refused to mention publicly as to what laws had these services contravened.

The English-language Arab News daily also mentioned that may try to end anonymity for Twitter users in the country by limiting access to the site only to people who register their identification documents. It was not clarified as to how such restrictions could be enforced since people can easily access the services if the application is already installed on their system or they download and install it through anonymous proxy servers.

As we mentioned in earlier article, “Saudis use ‘Islam’ for increasing international call revenue”, despite having 188 percent teledensity as of ending 2012 (according to CITC stats), Saudi telecom operators feel threatened by the increased use of VoIP services to connect to people around the world. This bypasses the traditional telecom voice route due to which they are unable to generate revenue through this channel.

Pakistanis Make Voice Calls of over 16 Billion Minutes Per Month

Thanks to unlimited and in-expensive voice bundles, Pakistani cellular users make voice calls – to landline and other cellular networks – of over 16 billion minutes or 192.9 billion minutes per year.

These stats were revealed by Pakistan Telecommunication Authority for year 2011-12 and it is likely that figure will go up further during the on-going year.

Cellular outgoing traffic to local fixed line and cellular network was recorded at 192.9 billion minutes during fiscal year 2011-12, showing an increase of 40 percent when compared with last year.

This voice traffic translates into an average of 528 million minutes per day or 22 million minutes per hour or 366,666 voice minutes per minute.

In other words — on average — there are around or over 366,666 mobile phone users on phone doing voice calling every time.

The substantial increase in cellular outgoing traffic is mainly attributed to low-cost voice bundles which allows virtually unlimited voice calling on local networks. Furthermore, the decreasing call rates – during FY 2011-12 – is said to be another reason for such increase in cellular outgoing traffic of Pakistan.

On average, a mobile phone user makes 141 minutes of outgoing calls from mobile phone per month. This can be translated to an average of 5 minutes of outgoing voice calls per subscriber per day.

It merits mentioning here that not all subscribers out of 120 million are activate in Pakistan and considering the amount of dormant subscribers’ base (around 40-45 million) this average of per subscriber calls can get double.

Interestingly, the outgoing traffic to landline numbers in 2011-12 dropped slightly from 2009-10.

National Cellular Outgoing Traffic

Average Outgoing Minutes Per Subscriber Per day

PTA stats said that international incoming traffic to Pakistani cellular networks reached 15.05 billion minutes per year or 1.25 billion minutes per month during July 2011 to June 2012, a sharp rise of 119 percent when compared to international incoming traffic on cellular networks during last year.

However, un-official sources say that international incoming traffic has gone down to 500 million minutes per month or 6 billion minutes per year — and is expected to go further down — after implementation of ICH, due to which rates have gone up for international incoming traffic to Pakistan.

International Cellular Mobile Traffic