State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has asked different institutions to remove mobile phone jammers by January 30. Previously issued licences for the jamming devices have been cancelled. Reason? The cellular companies contended that jammers were hampering the quality of service. As mobile portability comes near, mobile companies are forced to think about customer sastisfaction but they have started with pointing blame to external factors! Read full PTA directive here and business recorder coverage of this here.

What are mobile phone jammers?

There are times and places when and where a phone ring is not desirable: Cinemas, places of worship , exam venues, libraries etc. A cell phone jammer is an instrument used to prevent cellular phones from receiving and transmitting the mobile signals to a base station. By broadcasting on the same frequency as a mobile network they block signals, leaving phone users with a “no signal” message. Effectiveness of a jammer ranges from a few meters to  kilometres. A portable mobile phone jammer is shown on the left, courtsey of BBC.

PTA has directed all the institutions to off load all the mobile jammers as the deployment of such equipment is causing interference and blockage to the service in vast areas even outside the authorised premises. The policy also suggested a separate process to be adopted, in which an inter-ministerial committee will decide on future authorisations in the context of national security.

In US and UK jammers are illegal. France allowed jammers to be used in movie theaters and performance venues. In India Government and school use jammers.

Silent Communications is a company which caters to this problem. As reported here, Silent Communication estimates that “lost calls” are worth $20 billion per year worldwide, and that use of their product will drive up operator ARPU significantly.

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This is the first guest post on TelecomPk. The purpose of guest posts is to include diverse voices and view points about Pakistan telecom. -Babar

Guest Post By Safeer Ullah Khan

Pakistan’s telecom sector has seen phenomenal progress during past decade. It was deregulated in 1996. Since then, there has been no looking back. It has more than 48million cell phone users, and nearly 1.5 million wireless phone users. Landline is an old story.

Though this phenomenal growth has brought huge benefits to the people of Pakistan, yet it has its downside also. As Pakistan has nominal consumer protection laws, the consumers are being fleeced by every kind manufacturer/business including telecom operators. Wrong billing, deceptive price formulas, connectivity, clarity of voice, sale of used prepaid cards, deceptive advertisements, and lack of any compensation for damages incurred due to bad service of telecom operator are only a few.

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority established a complaint cell in 2002 to “facilitate and resolve the complaints made by an individual or a group against Telecommunication services”. Complaints can be reported by a toll free number (0800-55055) or using an online form. However there is no public information about the volume of complaints or its rate of successful resolution of these complaints. Judging from the situation, PTA complaint cell performance has not been satisfactory.

Consumers’ lack of awareness about their rights compounds the problem. Most of the people do not know that they can sue a company for bad service. Their complaints are not resolved. I am in touch with an independent Consumer Complaint Cell being run by The Network for Consumer Protection in Pakistan and know, first hand, that small problems are not resolved by the companies for which people have to turn to Consumer Complaint Cell.

Two large companies (PTCL holding sway in wireless and landline service, and Mobilink having largest number of mobile phone subscribers) are creating problems, which directly affect consumers. PTCL has refused to cut down bandwidth rates, while Mobilink is dragging its feet over Mobile Number Portability issue. Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has so far been unsuccessful in taming them.

I believe that this is happening because telecom users are not organized and do not have any say in these affairs. Telecom users need to get organized and establish an Association: Telecom Consumers Association, Pakistan (TCPA) that represents them and guides them in telecom related issues. The Association would make demands on these companies on behalf of telecom consumers. If a company does not behave, it can ask its members to boycott such company.

The Association can take up following functions:

1. It can create awareness among consumers about their rights with special focus on telecom consumers.
2. It can conduct quality and popularity surveys independently and let the consumers know which company offers best service.
3. It can keep an eye on the advertisements being aired by telecom operators and warn (or even sue) companies about unethical or deceptive advertisements.
4. It can inform its members and public about misleading advertisements of telecom operators.
5. It can have a good liaison with telecom operators to inform them about consumer issues and concerns.
6. It can mobilize telecom consumers to arrange peaceful protest rallies against companies that indulge in anti-consumer activities.
7. It can support and encourage Pakistan Telecom Authority to be tough on companies to protect consumers.
8. It can take up issues like reduction of broadband price and Mobile Number Portability and pressurize large companies to become consumer friendly.
9. It can mobilize policy makers/law makers to enact and implement consumer protection laws especially with provisions for compensation.

This is not a complete document. Nevertheless, it can work as a prototype for a big consumer protection association. This will set a trend, and consumers, in other sectors, would replicate it to protect their interests. It can become pioneer consumer protection association of Pakistan. Though it is merely a dream today, yet I have not doubt about its becoming a reality eventually. The sooner we make it happen, the better!

Safeer Ullah Khan is Editor of Sarif ki Pasand, The Network for Consumer Protection. He is based in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be reached at safeer1977@yahoo.com.

This is a snapshot of mobile industry’s growth in Pakistan in year 2006. By many measures 2006 was an amazing year for Pakistan’s mobile companies. The total subscribers reached 48.2 million, translating to mobile density of 31%. Two new companies - Warid and Telenor - entered the mobile marketplace and the increased competition from them spurred growth in Pakistan’s mobile sector. Ufone and Mobilink announced major network investment plans. Marketing campaigns were at the centre of Pakistan’s mobile growth. And most recently the uncertainty about future of Paktel ended with China Mobile buying it.

Government regulators at PTA must be pleasantly surprised by all this growth in 2006 but they have a lot more to take care of in 2007. One important upcoming change is the much anticipated, but delayed, mobile number portability implementation.

Here are the numbers and market share at the end of 2006 (source: PTA web site)

Mobilink leads with over 22 million customers but its market share has declined to 46%. Ufone is next with over 10 million customers. Warid has over 7.6 million and Telenor about 6.6 million. Paktel has 1.3 million customers and Instaphone has only 0.25 million customers.

According to some analysts Pakistan is likely join the small group of countries with over 100 million mobile subscribers during the second half of 2008, and that by the end of 2010, there could be over 120 million cellular customers in Pakistan. Lets hope that this growth does not come at the cost of quality or service.

For more about the mobile companies in Pakistan see my earlier post here.

Breaking news! Reported here that China Mobile has signed an agreement with Millicom to acquire Paktel (about 90% of it). This is really good news for customers and employees of Paktel as we have been discussing in this earlier post. Some excerpts from the above news report:

The deal, which values the Pakistani company at 460 million U.S. dollars, requires government approval but is expected to be completed in late February.

This is the first time that China Mobile has acquired a foreign telecommunication company of “strategic significance”. Last year, the Chinese telecommunication giant acquired all shares of Hong Kong’s fourth largest mobile operator, China Resources Peoples Telephone Co. Ltd. and a 19.9-percent stake in Phoenix TV.

Lets monitor the situation as it develops. I’m sure this will bring positive momentum to Pakistan’s economy.

In my last post I mentioned how Nokia and Motorola are working to come up with cheapaer phones for the emerging markets. In a previous post I also wrote about the Emerging Market Handset programme by Motorola. The USA Today article mentioned in the post about Nokia also presents “the remarkable story of one of Motorola’s emerging hit products in Asia: the pared-down, retro-yet-futuristic Motofone, designed from scratch as perhaps the first cellphone aimed at the rural poor.” As reported widely, Motofone was introduced in Pakistan a few weeks ago.

 This attention to emerging cellphone customers comes with a downside. On Jan 19 Motorola reported earnings and plans to cut 3500 jobs. Motorola blamed the lower quarterly profit on discounts on the Razr, and price declines on its most expensive phones with high-speed wireless connections and on cheaper phones sold in emerging markets, where competition was brutal.

Below are more excerpts from USA Today article.

The most radical thing about the Motofone is the screen. It’s the first cellphone to make use of technology from E Ink, a maker of electronic ink. E Ink is literally like ink embedded in the screen, and each molecule switches between dark and light depending on how it is zapped with electrical charges. Once the ink is electrified into a pattern — say, the time — it stays that way without using any more power, behaving like ink on paper.

The result serves two important purposes for the Indian market. First, the screen uses exceedingly less power than a typical illuminated cellphone screen. The Motofone has about 400 hours of standby battery time. Second, the screen is clearly visible in direct sunlight, again like ink on paper. This is a nifty feature when marketing to farmers and fishermen.

Anticipating that the Motofone would be used by millions of people who can’t read, its menus rely on icons and spoken language commands — in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi and Hindi. Thinking it would be used outdoors, Motorola made the phone dustproof. Knowing it had to be cheap, the Motofone has no camera or MP3 music player, so it costs only $40.

One other thing: The Motofone still had to be cool. “When someone is buying a phone in an emerging market, it is a status symbol,” Warrior says. It’s not uncommon for two villagers who meet for business to first put their cellphones on the table as a way to show off, the equivalent of pulling up to a meeting at a Silicon Valley restaurant in a Porsche.

The Motofone was has been getting a ton of attention. A review in PC World India said: “The Motofone will appeal not only to users in rural areas seeking a low-cost handset, but also first-time users in the urban market, too. Considering the price and form factor, this is a definite buy.”

Zander seems particularly proud of another, albeit far more low-tech, invention. It is a bike, outfitted with a generator attached to the back wheel. The generator is connected by wire to a cellphone holder on the handlebar. Millions of people who don’t have electricity could use this to charge their cellphones while riding their bikes.

However contrary to what Zander thinks Wall Street had alredy been critical of low-cost, low-margin products such as the Motofone and the bike generator. Earlier this month WSJ pointed out some key issues facing Motorola:

• RAZR-thin margins: Motorola appears to have failed to turn the blockbuster RAZR handset into high profit margins. One key reason, some investors and analysts say, is that company used the phone’s popularity to take market share by allowing the handset’s price to drop quickly.
• Broader offering: Much future growth is seen coming from more cost-conscious customers in developing nations, meaning a need to sell products in a variety of styles and price points, a strategy archrival Nokia has embraced. Motorola has had some success, doubling its share of the Indian market last year to 7%

I hope that Motofone will be successful in its contribution to reducing digital divide. Not all devices have a high short-term profit margin and investors should respect that. With some luck Motofone will pave the way to even better and cheaper phones with simple but real economic value adding features.

This post takes a look at Nokia’s performance and future direction with regards to emerging markets such as Pakistan. According to a recent article in USA Today, Nokia and Motorola are actively working on bridging the digital divide by providing cheap phones to the masses in developing countries. The news report mentions stories of farmers or fishermen who start using cellphones to sell goods to the highest bidder instead of the lone buyer in the village. The report makes an interesting point: in one little way after another, cellphones act like extra pushes on the economic flywheels of developing nations.

In the news report the CEO of world’s largest handset manufacturer, Nokia, cites numbers from a London Business School study concluding that an increase of 10 cellphones per 100 people in a developing country translates into GDP growth of 0.6 percentage points. I would like to analyze and evaluate that report myself.

According to BMI, with mobile phone usage surging across emerging markets, Nokia has reported booming sales during the 2006. Total revenues were up thanks to a 33% increase in the number of handsets sold. However Nokia’s growth is coming mainly from emerging markets, where demand is predominantly for cheap, entry-level handsets. As a result, the average selling price of its phones fell to EUR93, down from EUR102 in 2006.

Accounting for nearly one fifth of its total handset sales, Asia is a region of great importance to Nokia. Its success in Asia, and particularly in China and India has gone a long way to account for the Finnish company’s strong results in 2006. Nokia estimates that about half of all its business in emerging markets is from upgrades, indicating that consumers are beginning to move slightly higher up the value chain as the market develops. This is certainly the case in countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and China, where the market becomes increasingly mature. It is unliklely to be the case in Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan and India quite yet.

Nowhere in Asia is Nokia’s strategy clearer than in India, which it has started to use as an export base. In March 2006, the Finnish company opened its first Indian handset factory in Chennai. The then CEO of Nokia Jorma Ollila declared “We anticipate that there will be a long-term sustainable demand for mobile telephony in the fast-growing Indian market.”

Another reason for its investment is to use the country as a production hub. Making a few million handsets each month, Nokia projects that the factory will be in a position to export handsets in the second half of 2006, mainly to South-east Asia.

There’s no manufacturing facility in Pakistan as of now, even though Nokia is the best selling handset maker there and the total mobile subscribers are close to 50 million. During a recent visit, the Hungarian Foreign Minister Dr. Kinga Goncz said that at present Nokia phones are being manufactured in Hungary and steps are being taken by the Hungarian government to start manufacturing of Nokia mobile phones in Pakistan. After so many years of false starts I certainly hope there will be action on this.

BMI report on Nokia mentions that the blend of the manufacture of ultra-low cost handsets in a market that is growing voraciously combined with the use of India as a cheap logistics centre appears to be a winning formula, allowing the company to improve its distribution and compete directly with local players such as Korea’s Samsung and LG Electronics, as well as the likes of Huawei Technologies in China. 2007 will be another fierecely competitive year for Nokia.

This post is a brief overview of the contact /call center industry in Pakistan. The contact center is an increasingly important part of today’s globalized economy. With outsourcing growing with full speed, more and more companies are relying on oustourced contact centers to provide service and more importantly, building customer relationship. Riding on this wave, Pakistan’s call center industry has been steadily growing. In recent news ZRG announced its deal with U-fone for the automated implementation of U-circle package.

According to Farrukh Aslam, president Call Centres Association of Pakistan (CCAoP), the call center industry crossed $20 million figure during 2005. However, the Pakistan industry is hampered by a lack of skilled manpower. “We can do much better,” said Nasir Lone, country manager, The Resource Group - a US-based private investment firm with a focus on the business of call centres and outsourcing. Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) has published a report: Setting up Call Centers in Pakistan. The objective of this report is to create awareness among existing and potential investors and venture capital companies to explore Pakistan’s IT sector for the growth of their business.

A BusinessWeek report from May 2005 titled “Better Late Than Never In Outsourcing” also points out some of the challenges and opportunities of outsourcing to Pakistan. According to this article:

Pakistan is trying to copy India’s success in luring IT work, but it’s slow going. “As a natural course, American companies would not look at Pakistan,” acknowledges Jehan Ara, president of the 250-member Pakistan Software Houses Assn. “So we have to get them to look at us, and once they do business with us and credibility is established, they come back for more.”

Some 120 centers have opened in Pakistan in the past two years. Today they employ 3,500 people, and that number is expected to grow by 60% a year. Arwen Tech, a Karachi company that runs a 600-seat center, saw its sales double last year, to $10 million, serving clients such as Pakistan International Airlines and the local franchisee for KFC Corp. Now the company is building a 1,500-seat facility and hopes to boost revenues tenfold, to $100 million, in the next five years as it attracts more international clients.

Pakistan may face a shortage of IT workers. About 75,000 people work in the sector today, and the government believes a further 7,000 will be needed each year to keep the industry growing at current rates. But the country’s tech schools produce just 5,500 graduates a year — and only about a fifth of those are competitive and well trained, the Software Export Board says.

To fill in the skill gaps, Indian companies are training Pakistani companies on business process outsourcing (BPO) and call center setup as reported here and here.

The industry faces many other challenges: there is the security issue and political environment is shaky. Then there was a raid on call centers which created tension. Read more about it here.

And last but not least let us not forget the Internet and communication outage of 2005. The cable outage caused widespread economic damage and disruption in Pakistan, with 3,000 staffers reportedly laid off among the roughly 30 call centers that did not have backup capacity. Nine call centers in Pakistan reportedly had backup satellite connections provided at no cost by the government. In 2007 the situation is much better with redundancy and fallback options - but still a long way to go before Pakistan becomes an established hub of contact centers.

The overall prospects for the contact center industry in Pakistan are pretty good. Solution providers like ZRG, TRG and Arwen Tech need to keep delivering and evolve to the next level of expertise to ensure continued success.

Resources:

• PTCL Tariffs for Call Centers
• Call Center Conference 2005
• Pakistan Call Centers
• News about Touchstone’s Cotnact Center Operations

According to reports, Multinet Pakistan Ltd, a subsidiary of Telekom Malaysia, has signed capacity supply and service contracts worth 40 Million USD with Telenor Pakistan. Telekom Malaysiacontrols 78% stake in Multinet Pakistan, which is a broadband company (ISP).  Multinet is also licensed to provide Long Distance/International (LDI) services.

The capacity contract will allow Telenor to use fibre-optic cable pairs and associated co-location facilities along Multinet Pakistan’s national long haul transmission network, known locally as Project Ittehad. The service contract entails maintenance and associated services from Multinet for the duration of 20 years. Project Ittehad is a 4,100 km fibre-optic backbone connecting 107 cities across Pakistan, the first backbone project to be launched after the state-owned carrier Pakistan Telecommunication Co Ltd’s long haul network was completed in 1996. More on this here.

Telekom Malaysia has faced sluggish growth in its domestic market due to fixed-mobile substitution and VoIP offerings. However Telekom has finally become successful at the international front. In 2006 its Asian investments brought solid revenue and earnings contributions to its financials.

Telekom Malaysia had spent much of the late 1990s saddled with unprofitable investments in Africa but by 2004, it decided to switch its focus to Asia by acquiring a stake in Indonesian mobile operator, Excelcom. Having acquired a 49% stake in Spice, Telekom re-established itself in the Indian market at an opportune moment. It is doing business in many additional Asian countries: Indonesia (Excel), Bangladesh (Aktel), Cambodia (Casacom), SriLanka (Dialog), Singoapore (MobileOne). Telekom had announced creation of a separate group management team to overseas business development projects.

It is one of the companies to watch for as its current projects can position it for long-term success.

The mobile companies in many regions of the world do not enjoy the subscriber growth witnessed today in Pakistan, India and China. Therefore they have to work on new strategies to spur the growth and increase the revenue per subscriber. A recent paper in Alcatel Telecommunications Review (3Q 2006) summarized the challenges of high growth mobile markets and provided some suggestions to increase revenue.  The paper “Innovating to maintain momentum in mobile penetration” is available at Alcatel’s site. In this post I’ll share a few key points and figures from their paper.

Figure 1 is a summary of key challenges (click to see larger resolution image). The mobile companies in Pakistan will soon face many of these challenges.

Figure 2 is a graphical representation of growth markets vs. mature markets in terms of digial access index (see my earlier post on digial opportunity index). 

Figure 3 presents a view of how the telecom companies can use IP based networks to converge and optimize their solution offerings and at the same time increase their penetration by offering new services such as micro-payments. The next generation networks will play a key role in this growth. Of course some of the technologies shown here - WiMAX for example - are so new that their success or failure is still an open question. Still the point remains that current products and services can take these companies only so far. Companies such as WATEEN are already moving in this direction by providing triple play and mobile services.

Source: Alcatel.

As more and more confidential and sensitive data makes it way to mobile devices there is an increasing need to improve its security (e.g. lock the phone or remotely wipe its data if its stolen). The focus of this post however is to review the efforts of Trusted Computing Group (TCG) to improve mobile device security of say, data stored on your device or to prevent thieves from assigning a new number to a stolen device, a common problem in Pakistan and elsewhere. However the security of wireless data in transit is not in scope here.

TCG is a non-profit organization which was formed to develop open standards for hardware-enabled trusted computing and security technologies (building blocks and software interfaces across multiple platforms). Naturally it started with PCs and then moved on to other platforms. The TCG approach for mobile devices means that the operating system, platform, and application level functionalities, as well as SIM cards etc, interact in a secure, trusted manner. The TCG specifications enable trust in the mobile phone equipment itself.

TCG started working on how to extend the group’s PC security spec to the cellphone environment with its multiple stakeholders including users, carriers, OEMs and content providers. After 3 years of work, Trusted Computing Group rolled out Mobile Trusted Module (MTM), its standard for cell phone security in September 2006. The spec is intended to help make it easier to protect mobile data and applications, although several hurdles lay ahead for broadly adopting it. The 100-page document is available at this page in TCG site. The 4-page overview is an easier read but does not provide technical details.

About 50 companies worked to define the Mobile Trusted Module (MTM) spec. However, two of the largest cellphone chip makers—Texas Instruments and Qualcomm—did not participate in developing the spec. The only carriers involved in the work were Vodaphone and France Telecom. It was supported by Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung on the handset side and Intel on the processor side. It is believed that handset makers will start delivering MTM-enabled devices by early 2008.

Information Week reports that:

MTM specifications will create an industrywide approach to developing mobile devices that includes stronger security, ensures data privacy, and reduces the risk of malware-ridden mobile devices infecting company networks. This protection will be a boon to businesses like Visa and MasterCard, which want customers to pay for purchases using mobile handsets that contain radio frequency chips that can be read at the point of sale.

The draft MTM specification is designed to supply the core framework, commands, and control specifications needed to provide the security building blocks within a mobile phone or one embedded in a PDA. The draft specification is designed to be complementary with existing mobile phone components, including subscriber identity modules and universal integrated circuit cards, and with specifications from industry organizations such as the Third Generation Partnership Project, Open Mobile Alliance etc.

Many of the MTM’s specs are already implemented in some phones such as the popular BlackBerry by RIM. For more than two years, RIM has offered Content Protect to protect data stored locally on BlackBerry devices. RIM has also given administrators the tools to remotely lock or wipe lost and stolen devices so their data can’t be accessed by thieves.  Further technical description is ahead.

Read more »

The 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) which is going on in Las Vegas this week is the biggest show in its category in the US. This year Apple has caused a lot of buzz with its iPhone (see Pakistan’s wired forum discussion on iPhone in Pakistan). But there were many other interesting product and service announcements at CES as well. I would have loved to attend this show but anyway I am enjoying the online coverage of the show. Here are some excerpts from telecom related blog posts from WSJ - for the source and more posts visit their site.

Jobs Crashes the CES Party
Over at Macworld, Steve Jobs is whipping the crowd into a frenzy and striking fear in the hearts of phone companies around the world. Yes, Apple formally unveiled a new cellphone, as predicted. There were still plenty of surprises, however: The phone will have a touch-sensitive screen and no keypad, and will use a wireless connection to sync with Apple’s iTunes store. It can also browse the Internet using Cingular’s high-speed network.

Back to the Future with Mobile Broadcasts
As Internet and media companies give consumers ever-more ways to watch a piece of video programming at the moment they want it – through on-demand downloads and time-shifting – the cellphone industry is moving in the opposite direction: bringing people old school broadcasts of live TV.

In their first go at mobile video, cellphone companies have all gone with the time-shifting model — letting consumers stream and download video clips whenever they want. The issue is that the existing network can’t support large numbers of people downloading the same long-form program at the same time. A broadcast system does that much better.

Scan Before You Super-Size
And here’s one more thing you won’t see in the U.S.: a cellphone that tells you how many calories are in your Big Mac extra-value meal. The Shine handset from LG Electronics, part of the company’s “Black Label” series, was designed jointly by LG and BMW, will be available in the U.S. this year. But in Japan, the phone has an additional function. McDonald’s has outfitted food wrappers and boxes with bar codes that, can be read by cameras in Shine phones. The phones then display nutritional information, calorie counts and allergy warnings.

LG’s line of phones — including the Chocolate phone in pink, gold and platinum — are getting a lot more attention than the company’s 71-inch plasma TVs.

Cisco’s Human Network
Cisco has a new marketing slogan: Human Network. CEO John Chambers’s eyes lit up during an interview yesterday, when he was asked whether phone, cable and mainstream media companies knew what they wanted, given the onslaught of competition and shift in consumer behavior. Are they overwhelmed by such rapid changes — and are they turning to Cisco for answers? “They know what they want,” he said. “They have a vision. But it’s all about execution.” Mr. Chambers showed how a consumer could listen to the song over a car stereo, exit the vehicle and pick the song up on a handheld device, enter the home and have the option of playing the song on the stereo or watch a music video on tv. “Your content follows you on any device, anywhere,” he said.

Mr. Chambers said the consumer can not be asked to create this network and should only have to sit back and take advantage. So the level of complexity will have to be solved by Cisco’s technology and its partners.

I like these new products. I am sure many of the products will spur more discussion and there will be more posts here.

Search for ”Cell Phone Snatching” in google and many of the results will be about mobile phone snatching in Pakistan. It is a problem all over the world - but with the explosive growth of mobile phone subscribers in Pakistan this menace has also risen to an alarming proportion. As the media and bloggers have been pointing out, the IMEI blocking system put in place a few months ago by the government has many limitations and therefore its effectiveness is very limited. In addition to the technical aspect, this problem requires a combination of social, administrative and legislative solution.

The cell phone industry is working on improvements to the hardware and chips to make the phones and the data on it more secure. However the set of standards and changes will take a while to reach us. What can we do now? A recent article in WIRED magazine has some interesting tips about fighting phone snatching. Of course none of these tips and techniques by themselves can effectively foil cell phone thieves and snatchers. The article suggests these:

4 Antitheft Technologies (Source: WIRED magazine)

• Screamer The Remote XT harasses UK cell-swipers with a loud, high-pitched human scream (the service puts a recording of a woman shrieking on your phone). The system activates when the owner calls a hotline. The nerve-jarring wails accompany a complete data wipe and button lockdown, creating one useless piece of plastic.

• Gait and Voice Recognition Researchers at Finland’s VTT Technical Research Centre are developing a sensor system that enables a phone to recognize its owner’s unique style of walking. The plan is to combine this gait monitor with voice recognition software, so if your gadget senses a different stride or vocal pitch, it locks up and requests a password.

• Holster SensorCanada’s Research in Motion (of BlackBerry fame) is working on a phone that pairs wirelessly with its holster. If the two get separated, the phone locks up and asks for a password, and an alert goes off on the holster, notifying the owner immediately – provided, of course, the thief didn’t steal the holster, too.

• GPS Tracker Japanese mega telecom NTT DoCoMo introduced six handsets equipped with a GPS tracking service in October. If one of these phones goes missing, you can just log onto a Web site and locate it on a map. Then all you have to do is confront the pickpocket or get the police to give a damn about a stolen phone.

I’ll leave you with an advertisement clip from Sprint, a US company about using its phone as a crime deterrent. Some of you will find it hilarious.
[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-7107840583664584754]