ISLAMABAD - Chairman National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC) Viqar Rashid Khan said that the corporation has started a process to establish submarine cable landing station at the Gawadar deep sea port.

"Laying of optical fiber cable (OFC) to start connectivity from Shikarpur to Gawadar along the new Motorways under CPEC, Cross Border Connectivity with Iran, China and Afghanistan and vice versa is also in progress," he said while taking to APP.

He said "Despite the downward trend in use of fixed line telephone in the country, NTC has been able to increase its fixed line subscriber base by 6 per cent and broadband subscribers to 36 per cent which record growth and performance."

He said that due to migration of TDM to IP based NGN network, NTC has been able to develop 54,000 telephone sets and 6,000 broadband in a record one year. To a question he said, the establishment of first National Data Center is the

realisation of the vision of the Prime Minister which is spearheaded by the Minister for IT.

He said that policies of the last three years at NTC have earned countrywide acclaim and acknowledgements and has resulted in a turnaround from a loss making entity few years ago to a forward looking, customer oriented and profitable Govt organisation.

He said that prior to this particular development, that is, National Data Centre, NTC owing to its innovative services and products such as multi-service data network, switches, digital cross connect and Internet services has been providing its subscribers Intranet, email, webhosting, virtual private networking, video conferencing, DSL and other customised services at par with any world-class telecom service providers.

Viqar Rashid Khan said that with this important milestone, which is aimed at providing next-generation value added services to various arms of the government as NTC is going to enable its customers to join the swim in terms of future telecom technologies.

To a question he said, NTC was going in to financial loss and development was stagnant.

In order to compete in the competitive market under deregulated environment specially in the circumstances when other telecos are entering in to NTC domain, NTC adopted a "Proactive and Reach Out Policy" which in turn has made the entire NTC team more responsive, more performance driven and more result oriented, he added. After five years, he said, NTC has been able to turn the tables on its budgetary loss by earning net profit before tax to the tune of Rs 257 million for Financial Year 2015-16, showing a total recovery of Rs 356 million after adjustment of budgeted loss.

There was a financial growth of 359 per cent during last financial year (2015-16), which is a record performance in the history of NTC and in any Public Sector in Pakistan, he added.

He said, NTC within last two years, had been able to execute and complete over 87% of its ADP projects in 2014-15 and 76 per cent in 2015-16 which is record growth in any Public Sector Organization.

Never in the history, NTC completed more then 25- 30 per cent of its ADP projects, he stated.

He said, NTC has also started planning to provide Internet of Things (IoT) services to government entities, through Public Private Partnership.

"We have also pursuing different government departments for provision of mobile financial services under Public Private Partnership" he added.