Archive for October 10th, 2007

WiMAX World 2007 Keynote

Published by Babar Bhatti on October 10, 2007 under Broadband Internet, Emerging Markets Telecom, ICT, IPTV, Networks, Telecom News, Telecommunications, Wimax, Wireless

See keynote at Wimax world 2007 by Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior . She talks about the impact of Wimax on both emerging (Pakistan) and mature markets (US, Europe) and about the new on-demand applications which will ride the wave of always on mobile broadband. At a time when Motorola is struggling to regain its leadership position, WiMAX has become critical to Motorola’s future. 

Pakistan is mentioned at 5:20, 9:40 and 13:36.

Thanks to Ajit for the original post at OpenGardens blog.

SMS Marketing And Subscriber Rights

Published by Babar Bhatti on October 10, 2007 under Consumer Rights, Marketing, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Companies, sms

logo-mworld.jpgMobilink offers SMS marketing as one of the business services. The page on the MobilinkWorld site boasts of the 20+ million subscriber base. This service allows up to 1o million messages to be sent. So if one has the funds and wants to reach tens of millions of mobilink customers, its that easy. And the 10 million limit does not seem to be an absolute one, I am certain there are ways around that if the price is right.

What about subscriber rights? Can the subscribers opt-out? In the terms and conditions its mentioned that “Subscribers will be given the option to opt out of receiving broadcast messages“.

This is a typical case of the provider keeping the control and limiting choices for subscribers. I am not singling out Mobilink but using it as an example. It sounds to me that only after the subscribers start getting these messages they are given the option of taking some action to stop future messages. What action is needed for customers to avoid getting these messages? Where is the policy defined?