State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Guest Post By Rakesh Gopchandani – originally published at his blog – Paths.

The International Telecom conference at ITCN-ASIA 2007 was held on Aug 9-11 at Karachi Expo center. Over the years, ITCN (Ecommerce Gateway Pakistan) has become known for industry gatherings in which high profile technological announcements are made. Last year at the ITCN conference, Telenor announced its EDGE service. This year at ITCN, it was Wateen which announced WiMax’s commercial deployment.

The first session was mostly filled with keynote addresses from big-hats of Nortel, Wateen, PTCL and Motorola along with a little opening ceremony by the City Nazim right in the middle of the session. The speakers were talking about how big the Telecommunication infrastructure has grown in the country and how desperately we need the killer applications to ride on this new wave of data-com infrastructure. When inquired on what that killer application might be, the speakers pointed towards Video-on-demand and Internet-applications as the biggest contender. I particularly liked the session on Hyper-connectivity and the place for 4G wireless networks in it by Nortel, their managing director explained how future devices that can be connected and need to be connected will be connected. Also, the exchange of sentences between the two Qureshis from Wateen and PTCL (now to-be fierce competitors for their common market in OFAN and Broadband links) was interesting.

Many insightful tidbits were shared in the second session. The new business model for rural areas by Nokia-Siemens Networks particularly attracted my attention. The idea is to use WiMax from the pre-existing cellphone towers to give connectivity to smaller, low-powered, low-cost (installation and operational) base stations (called Access Points) in rural areas which are franchised to local entrepreneur and then charging a flat monthly fees for all calls made within that access point and charging the calls going outside and going inside that small, remote network. As per their studies in the pilot in India, they had more than 52% calls which were within the access point network! The presentations from ZTE containing a reminder on social, cultural and environmental obligations of telecommunication industry to the country was also very enlightening.

And it all ended with a little trip around the exhibition and a late lunch with friends during the Karachi rains. At the end of the day, I was thinking that we are doing so much here, what else is to follow? We are still ranked quite low on tele-density, although we have one of the fastest growing voice services consumer base. Is the growth rational at all or is it all for ordering potatoes via cellphone? Can we justify the current growth with the social dynamics of our country where the rural population cannot even send a text message in English lest using Internet there!