State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

I have previously discussed the explosive growth of media captured on mobiles and the need for sharing it, to make it work without putting too much burden on the users. A few interesting trends have emerged in the last few months. PixSense has picked up momentum and their solution was implemented by Telenor - great news for this Pakistani startup. At the same time, Nokia has been on a roll, acquiring soical networking and mobile ad startups such as Enpocket. Nokia has also introduced Ovi, a set of services for mobiles, which needs a post of its own. Twango, a media sharing application, is one of the companies Nokia bought for around $100 million. Naturally that caused headlines and prompted many (including myself) to take a look at Twango’s services.

With so many photo and video sharing sites (photobucket, snapfish, mobango etc) it can be hard to compare and select one. What is it that makes one media sharing site better than others? I believe its a combination of a few factors. Usability and presentation. Features such as online editing, tagging, time lines, subscriptions etc. Ease of sharing with people (without forcing them to register) and at blogs and networking sites.  There’s the reliability and trust element as well; many don’t want their personal stuff uploaded to a random startup with sketchy privacy policies.

TM has posted a detailed analysis of Telenor’s Picshare launch and gave it a 6/10 rating. I recommend read the full review and the related commentary at TGP. In this post I’ll review Twango, its features and how it works. My usage scenario is simple and typical. I want to be able to share my media easily with friends and family anywhere in the world.

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Continuing the coverage of 3G and WiMAX, here’s a research paper by a grad student at Colorado University, which provides the point of view that 3G technologies have an edge over WiMAX. I wanted to share it to see what you think. For those who are interested in a detailed comparison, it is a good reference. Note that the context of the paper is North American market so the conclusions do not necessarily make sense for other markets such as Pakistan.

Here’s the source of the abstract, full paper is here.

There has been much conversation over the past few years regarding the evolution of next-generation air interfaces supporting mobile broadband. One of the most talked about as far as promise is concerned is 802.16e, otherwise known as mobile WiMAX. In its advertised form, the standard can support data rates of tens of megabits per second while supporting many real-time user applications that cannot be supported by third-generation technologies. Although mobile WiMAX sounds promising as a next-generation technology, other factors do exist which will limit its overall success. Some of the factors that will be discussed in this paper will include the design challenges facing base-station architecture, competing third-generation long-term evolution (LTE) technologies, and costs to existing service providers to upgrade their networks. This paper is meant to demonstrate that from a service-provider’s point-of-view, the upgrade path to mobile WiMAX may not be the correct solution.