Need For Better Local Internet Clearing In Pakistan
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.
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I do agree with most of what is said. Now that PTCL is in the BroadBand game it would indeed be funny to see PTA reducing tarriff per bandwidth consumed all over. Or subsidizing bandwidth for PTCL giving them unfair advantage over other rivals against which the industry should rise up eventually.
There is also a very grim need to do something about Pakistan’s intranet, not just the three or four major cities, but we need more gateways for smaller towns and cities connected with better medium and capacity. I hear people in Okara, Gujaranwala and D. I. Khan are still using dialup. (Will the WiMax help any of this, I won’t really bet on it looking at the pace of things getting under way?)
The success of the internet (broadband, especially) in the US, Europe, Japan, etc. is not because they could access the best websites or web servers in the world with no problem, rather it was the easy access of information and media developed and published locally on their internet. The internet to the common man in Pakistan still doesn’t make any sense because there is nothing spectacular in Urdu or any local language only.
why dont the local ISPs set up a neutral Internet exchange point?