State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

I wanted to share this great opportunity from PTA for students and researchers. As described below, the idea for cash reward and gold medals is to encourage ICT research within Pakistan. Please forward this information to others so that all those who may be eligible get to hear about it. Hats off to PTA for this initiative and I hope to see some great ideas.

Note that the deadline is Oct 1, 2007. Click on the image to see more details or see the PTA site.

PTA plans to award 5 Gold Medals to shining students of accredited universities offering IT & Telecom disciplines. Prime objective of this award is to encourage academia to undertake research in telecom sector and develop relationship with academia for advice on important issues faced by the Regulator in the sector. Students of Masters Program working on their final project/thesis (in IT & Telecom with a prior 4 years degree in the similar discipline) will also be eligible.

USF (see my previous post) is a way to provide telecom services to under-served areas based on the pooled funding collected from telecom services. It is an important regulatory tool to reduce the digital divide. Last week Pakistan’s Minister for Information Technology provided details about a plan to provide telecommunication services to 6 under-served areas of the country. As the first rollout of its kind in Pakistan, it will be important to see if this USF implementation meets the needs of citizens in these areas and if the funds are used in a fair and just manner.

According to media reports, the six geographical areas marked out in the divisions of Malakand, Sukkar, Sibbi, Chaghi, DG Khan and Attockwere selected due to a large part of the population in these areas still in want of telecommunication services. The project will be launched within the next few weeks. Note that some of the areas above (such as Sibbi) were heavily damaged by the recent floods. Click on the image to see a larger map.

Excerpts from the report below - [I've taken out the praise for the government policies]:

The funds for the project would be provided by the multi-billion rupees Universal Service Fund instituted within the Ministry of Information Technology through annual contributions received from the telecom operators. The auctioning of the funds is already under way. These funds will be provided to existing telecom operators which would implement the project

The minister said the designated under-served areas to be covered under the first phase of the project also constituted approximately 3 per cent of total population and 23 per cent area of the country. He said the USF had a plan to achieve 85 per cent population coverage and increase rural tele-density to 5 per cent by the year 2010. He said another goal the USF had set out to achieve was a nationwide broadband penetration, by adding on 1.5 million new users by the year 2010.

The minister was speaking at the 5th meeting of the USF Board of Directors. The meeting was also attended by IT secretary Farrakh Qayyum, member telecom Nooruddin Baqai, Telenor Pakistan’s CEO Tore Johnson, WOL CEO Azfar Manzoor and USF CEO Parvez Iftikhar.

Wireless week has a special report out on mobile advertising- its challenges and rewards. As with any new technology, business is trying to make sense of what will work. The report points out that “advertisers are familiar with working with print, TV, radio and the Internet as separate entities. But mobile networks can bring together the Internet, video, text, gaming, music and more.”  An important point as emphasized in the report is: Advertisers want to buy audiences and not technology.

I am including an excerpt about the sms based advertising in the US. I consider this approach relevant to Pakistan’s market.

Text-based campaigns and WAP sites have become the two main avenues for brands to reach mobile subscribers.

One of the companies involved in text-based advertising is qtags, a Houston-based mobile marketing company that uses short codes to provide mobile interactive content, including promotions and coupons. Its clients include Accenture, NAS Recruitment, Fidelity Investments, Toyota, Verizon Wireless, American Express, CITI and Hewlett Packard.

“Our goal,” says founder Allison Gower, “is to help the consumer control their advertising.” Qtags connects consumers and brands off-line and online, Gower says, by making content interactive via SMS. An example is texting a keyword like “Verizon” to qtags’ shortcode, 78247, and the user gets information about jobs available at Verizon Wireless. The texts are saved online. Many of the current campaigns are job recruitment related.

The service can help brand names build communities of consumers who have an interest in their products, Gower says. The overall service is free of advertising although community sites might have sponsored sites.

Mobile provides context of time and place, she says. When someone enters a store and sees a promotion, a consumer can text to get specials listed on their phone.

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