The move comes after the country’s primary telco, Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT), received 32 complaints about long-distance phone calls residents say they never made, several of which resulted in phone bills between $500 and $1,000.
Sri Lanka has a per capita income of less than $900.
The Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) of Sri Lanka responded by requiring ISPs and other service providers to prevent direct-dial calls to several countries where the hijacked calls were found to terminate, including Tokelau, Kiribati, Nauru, Tuvalu, Vanuatu and several other nations most people have never heard of.
Officials said the direct-dial ban would remain active for a minimum of three months, something Sri Lanka Telecom representatives describe as unfair.
“There are 34 international gateways and only we have been targeted for this action of the TRC,” a Sri Lanka Telecom spokesman told local press on Monday. “We plan to appeal against this and we are already working on it.”
According to records, however, all of the recent complaints originated from members of SLT’s network, which is 35 percent held and fully managed by Japan's Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp.
“We don’t have a single complaint against any of the other gateway operators,” explained PR Amarasiri, TRC’s legal affairs director. “All the complaints we received were from SLT subscribers, which is why we took this action.”
Amarasiri said that although the TRC had requested the gateway be shut for three months, he was fairly certain the company could complete a monitoring process in about 30 days.
As a result of the ban, Sri Lankan residents must use an operator to make calls to the blocked countries, which is more expensive than direct dialing. The ban is considerably more inclusive than a similar effort put forth by officials in Ireland in 2004, which also blocked direct calls to several countries but gave subscribers the option of unblocking their number if they wished.