MoIT Developing System To Limit Grey Traffic

Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication (MoIT) has been developing an operating system to limit grey traffic for reducing about Rs. 3 billion loss in revenue per year. National ICT Research and Development has funded Rs. 13.51 million for implementing Automatic Monitoring and Detection System (AMDS) in collaboration with Comsat Institute of IT (CIIT), Islamabad.

What does grey traffic mean? Telephone companies around the world use a different International telecom routes to send traffic to each other and the common ones include White, Grey or Black routes. Grey route is a route taken for an international call such that it appears as a domestic call in order to save on expensive call rates. These routes are identified in networks where the call was terminated through signs such as heavy load in certain network areas, short voice calls or incomplete call information.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) defines grey telephony as use of illegal gateway exchanges to bypass legal PTCL gateways to terminate/originate international traffic, including through VoIP gateways, GSM gateways, WLL phones, mobile SIMs or other related equipment.

The system being developed to deal with grey telephony will have four major building blocks. The purpose of the system will be to collect data, analyze and report the results in a meaningful format for monitoring the traffic.

The project is said to be completed in two phases and will begin at CIIT. The first phase will include training and installation of a real time system at Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE). The second phase will be to test the system in real-time environment before launching it properly.

Via Daily Times