Archive for October 19th, 2007

Need For Better Local Internet Clearing In Pakistan

Published by Babar Bhatti on October 19, 2007 under Broadband Internet, Digital Divide, ICT, Pakistan, Telecommunications

Tee Emm’s post about th need for a local internet clearing within Pakistan is intersting and thought-provoking. According to Tee Emm, the local clearing should avoid (or minimize) expensive foreign exchange costing international links and should result in very affordable bandwidth rates - using the SKA (sender keeps all) or cheaper local bandwidth models.

A couple of questions around this idea come to mind: If the private sector has to do it alone then the business case for this should be well established - has anyone worked on this? or should it be a public-private sector partnership? In my opinion this ought to be part of PTA’s mandate. By the way I hope that the IT ministry and PTA realize that they desperately need to do something about broadband in Pakistan.

Tee Emm notes that in Karachi, the majority of the traffic between the 3 well-known ISPs ( Worldcall, Cybernet & Multinet) is exchanged outside Pakistan on Transworld, PIE and on IPLC towards KL in Malaysia. He mentions the following issues (see the full post) with the current situation.

Short Term Problems:

  • Uniform (high) Internet prices across the industry
  • Unnecessary 20% to 35% for-ex spending on Int’l circuits that could be sold to the right customer at a premium
  • No cheap ‘local bandwidth’ available to users
  • No incentive for ‘remaining local’ to users or content publishers
  • Network outages beyond Pakistan result in network outages inside Pakistan

Long Term Problems:

  • No impetus for establishing local data center for Internet hosting needs (excluding vertical DS such as Banking etc)
  • As more of the country embraces Internet, ’short term problems’ identified above will get magnified.
  • No mirrors of popular contents - even those willing to place their contents near the Pakistani Internet users are amazed at the absence of local IDCs.
  • No real development of Urdu and other regional languages contents on the Internet.