State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

As mentioned a while ago on TelecomPk, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) had started investigation and corrective measures to combat fraudulent and fake SIMs with cooperation of mobile companies and NADRA. This month PTA has release some numbers about their efforts.

PTA issued detailed operating procedures for mobile operators to ensure sale of new SIMs with proper documentation and had asked for verification of old records through NADRA. Cellular mobile companies have completed verification of approximately 85% data of their subscribers through NADRA.

More from the PTA press release:

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I have written about Universal Service Fund in Pakistan before. I stumbled upon its website through a banner ad about the broadband initiative by USF Pakistan. Details are in this Concept Paper (PDF, 816 KB) and in the graphic below. Unlike telephony work in the rural areas, the broadband focus by USF is on whole of Pakistan.

Soliciting feedback and comments is a sensible move (the deadline has passed already). Lets see if USF can act on that advice, overcome the hurdles to broadband in Pakistan and make a meaningful change!

Note that USF has been estalished as an entity (company) by Ministry of IT.

Some of us at Telecom Grid Pakistan have been working on a Wiki for all things related to telecommuniction in Pakistan. A few of the topics in progress on the Wiki are listed below. The idea for this Wiki is to become a source of information and archives for the common good for everyone who is involved in the telcommunication industry in Pakistan. 

We need your help to add relevant and useful content to the Wiki. Please feel free to contact me or to leave comments on what improvements we can make to this effort.

TelecomWiki Resources
Overview of Telecom Industry in Pakistan
Who’s Who in Pakistan Telecom
Pakistan ICT Related Research and Development
Pakistan ICT Policy and Regulation
Pakistan Telecom Career Guide
Career Guide for Students
Pakistan ICT Related Blogs
Pakistan ICT Related Mailing Lists & Groups
Electronic and Print Media For Pakistan ICT
Telecom Related Startups
Business & Finance Information For Pakistan ICT Industry

After many months of the fastest growth ever, the slowdown has eventually hit the Pakistan mobile industry. The chart tells the story: since July the monthly additions have gone down. Mobilink and Telenor continue their strong growth trends and are set to be the leaders. Ufone growth was slow in Sep and Oct.

 Any explanations for this trend?

A few months ago I wrote about DRITTE and the interesting research work by Umar Saif and team at LUMS. One of their projects is  Peer-to-Peer Dialup Networking which aims to mitigate the digital divide by creating efficiencies from dialup Internet. Also called poor man’s broadband, the concept is as illustrated below.

 

This work, funded by Microsoft Research’s Digital Inclusion Grant, was featured in New Scientist. Note that lack of cheap ‘local bandwidth’ in Pakistan is something which has been discussed actively on blogs and forums (here and here).

Here is the abstract of the paper:

In this paper we present a peer-to-peer dialup architecture for accelerated “Internet access” in the developing world. Our proposed architecture provides a mechanism for multiplexing the scarce and expensive international Internet bandwidth over higher bandwidth p2p dialup connections within a developing country. Our system combines a number of architectural components, such as incentive-driven p2p data transfer, intelligent connection interleaving and content-prefetching. This paper presents a detailed design, implementation and evaluation of our dialup p2p data transfer architecture inspired by Bittorrent.

For more information see this review at SIGCOMM site. You can also download the paper from there. The authors include Umar Saif, Ahsan Latif Chudhary, Shakeel Butt, and Nabeel Farooq Butt. Great job, congratulations to the team!

I will write more about their other interesting projects soon. Here’s an excerpt from New Scientist (subscription needed) article:

IT’S not often that you get to go faster by avoiding the superhighway, but soon students in Pakistan will be able to download big files faster by avoiding the internet.

Instead of using expensive broadband or slow, unreliable dial-up connections, students at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) will try out a new system, dubbed “poor man’s broadband” (PMB). It allows computers to link to each other directly for faster downloads, and it works as long as at least one computer running the trial software has already downloaded the desired file from the internet. The system should also reduce the university’s risk of  overloading the bandwidth supplied by its internet service providers (ISPs).

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As reported by Associate Press of Pakistan which cited the PTA 2007 annual report. After all these years there is still talk of incentives for handset makers and all that but no tangible plans have been announced. It also misses the point that with large scale phone manufacturing in India and China, it is hard to attract manufacturers to Pakistan.

Around 20 per cent of mobile users in Pakistan change their handset thrice a year which indicates that Pakistan is a lucrative market for manufacturers of mobile handsets and other telecom equipment. A similar percentage of mobile users change the mobile handset once a year and this could be a successful business model, said Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) in its latest report.

A survey conducted by the Authority this year also found that 20 per cent user change the mobile handset every two years.

The report said the strategic location of Pakistan which has spent about $1.347 billion on import of cellular mobile handsets and other telecom apparatus in 2006-07 is also an added advantage.

According to the report, the government was considering giving incentives to leading manufacturers of cellular mobile handsets and telecom equipment to consider manufacturing mobile sets and other equipment locally where more than two to three million subscribers were being added on cellular mobile networks every month and still a large patentable exists.

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PTA has released annual report for 2007 at its website (Media Center >> News/Updates). It is professionally written and has a wealth of information and supporting content (67 figures, 28 tables and 10 annexes) . Students, journalists and analysts should find this very useful. The contents of the report will be discussed and debated here in upcoming posts.

Here are the chapters, each available in pdf from the PTA site:

Chapter 1 - Economic Performance of Industry
Chapter 2 - Regulating the Competition
Chapter 3 - International Relations
Chapter 4 - Mobile Cellular Services
Chapter 5 - Long Distance International
Chapter 6 - Local Loop Services
Chapter 7 - Broadband and Value Added Services
Chapter 8 - Telecom Deregulation in AJ&K and NAs
Chapter 9 - Trends in Telecom Technologies

This is related to the series about linux and mobile devices / phones. I believe 2008 will be the year when linux for mobile devices will hit big, partly thanks to android. But Linux has some formidable challenges. This post takes a look at one of them - Symbian (48% owned by Nokia), which is one of the top OS makers for smart phones.

As many know, phones based on Nokia S60 uses Symbian’s proprietary operating system. Nokia N82 is the latest phone (more of a gadget actually because of its slick camera) which is based on S60 and Symbian. Symbian is also behind Motorola (MOT) Z8 slider. The user interface of Z8 was positively reviewed by bloggers. Some of the improvements are attributed to a recent upgrade of the OS by the company.

The graphic above shows the market share of smart phone operating system (source: GigaOm) by various region. Overall Symbian is in high gears and ready to take on its competitors.

Recently Symbian posted good results with 56% year-on-year rise in third-quarter product shipments to device manufacturers and said that its revenue had increased by 30% in the same period.

Symbian’s technology has now shipped in 165 million devices. However, average royalties per unit dropped in the period to $4.8 per unit from $5.2 per unit a year ago.

Symbian reported that shipments of its operating system were up to 20.4 million units, from 13 million units a year earlier, in the three months ended Sept. 30, while revenue increased to GBP52.4 million from GBP40.3 million.

The telecom sector in Pakistan continues its growth and many jobs have been announced recently. As I received many comments on my previous posts for jobs, I am listing some open positions to help those who are looking for jobs. As the job listings for all companies change with time it is best to go each company’s website and look at the latest opportunities.  And please don’t leave your contact info or job application here. This is only a blog which provides information, it is not a place to apply for job!

Huawei

Huawei is looking for engineers (technical and sales), marketing managers, product managers and for many other skills such as Site Acquisition Manager. Here’s how to look for all the open jobs for Huawei in Pakistan:

Please click here and in the country search dropdown Select Pakistan and click on search. Click on the image above to see the screenshot of the search page.

For example Huawei is looking for a Product Manager Mobile Network (CDMA).

Telenor:

Visit Telenor.com.pk/careers/Jobs.php for details and positions available.

A few jobs listed at the above site include:

• Marketing Executive (Budgeting and Reporting)
• Executive - Project Office
• Assistant Brand Manager

Good luck and remember to direct any questions to the above companies and not on this blog. Feel free to leave general comments.

In the November issue of Global Telecom News:

• Korea’s SK Telecom acquires Hanarotelecom
• Rise of HTC in Taiwan and how it is playing dual game with windows and linux
• 3G pushes demand for chip industry

As we have been discussing, SK Telecom, Korea’s top wireless service provider, had plans to expand its business. But SKT has not yet made a move outside Korea. It has been announced that SK Telecom will take over the country’s second-largest telephone and broadband line provider, Hanarotelecom. SK Telecom’s acquisition is expected to trigger a flurry of mergers and takeovers in and outside the telecommunications industry, according to Korea Herald. The stocks of SKT have soared on this news.

Taiwan’s High Tech Computer (HTC) is the largest maker of mobile phones running on Microsoft Corp’s system. Now it is hedging its bets by going with Google’s android and it joined on the open handset alliance. HTC also expanded a distribution agreement with U.S-listed Brightpoint to improve the global reach of its entire range of products and services.

The business opportunities of the third generation (3G) mobile telecommunications chips booms in China. Chinese government has officially announced to support TD-SCDMA and GSM (GPRS) as the mobile telecommunications standards in China. Taiwan Business News reports that this means that a few companies will benefit from this.

ZTE Corporation, in charge of the TD-SCDMA network establishment in Beijing, Qin Huang Dao, Xiamen and so forth, says that the network establishment in most areas and Olympic game stadiums in Beijing will be completed by the year’s end. The network coverage rates in Liaonin, Tienjin and Shenzhen will top 90 percent. The TD-SCDMA mobile telecommunications network will be able to come into use in the top ten cities late this year or early next year.

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Details of Voluntary Separation Scheme (VSS) at PTCL have emerged with information also provided at PTCL site which puts it like this in Urdu: Aap Ki Hidmat Ka Etraf  (We recognise your services).

Total cost is about Rs 35 billion, out of which 50 per cent amount will be paid by the good old Government of Pakistan. The intended / eligible target of VSS are PTCL employees who are not over 58 years of age – probably management does not consider them relevant to the latest technology and strategy. According to insiders, this scheme works well for those who are relatively new at PTCL. As I have written before, if PTCL management handles this well, then this could be good for both the company and its employees in the long run. Business Recorder provides more information.

The government has imposed ban on re-employment of those employees of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) who will opt for Voluntary Separation Scheme (VSS), informed sources told Business Recorder.

“The Ministry of Information Technology will ensure that optees who are granted voluntary separation will not be re-employed by PTCL,” the sources quoted Cabinet Committee on Privatisation (CCoP) as giving directions to the Privatisation Commission.

Read more »

Activists in Pakistan are leveraging technology to organize and support their campaign against the martial law in Pakistan. Using the tools of mobile phones, SMS, Wikis, social networking and blogging, the activists have stepped up to fill the gap left behind by the absence of news and TV channels. I reported about the rising trend of mobile activism in the world in July and I asked a question that if this is something we will see in Pakistan in the short term. The recent turn of events has made mobile activism a sucessful reality in Pakistan. See other posts about mobile activism in Pakistan here and here.

Due to the low number of Internet users and the very limited broadband in Pakistan, blogs and other Internet based tools are not within the reach of the masses. Text messaging on the other hand has been very popular and with the 70 million plus mobile subscribers, this is a medium which is widely spread in Pakistan. Bloggers report that Saturday 3rd November saw the highest ever number of SMS sent with an average of 10 text messages being sent across the networks per subscriber.

Business Week reports about this Bloom of E-Resistance in Pakistan:

Relying on Text Messages
Indeed, for ordinary Pakistanis, the cell-phone text message has proved a saving grace, one not yet withdrawn by Musharraf. Internet penetration in Pakistan is low, but Pakistan is one of the world’s fastest-growing cell-phone markets, with user numbers growing 73% this past year. The country of 160 million currently has 67 million cellular subscribers, and, according to Pakistan watchers, in the past week many Pakistanis have been sending and receiving at least 10 text messages a day from relatives overseas who watch the international news on Pakistan and feed the information back home. A conservative estimate of 500 million text messages a day is a bonanza for cell-phone operators.

Along with writing on blogs and posting on wikis, bloggers are also making use of sms to report updates and send alerts. The blog by Teeth Maestro is using SMS2Blog technology as explained here:

We have enabled LIVE SMS-2-BLOG services allowing citizen reporters in Pakistan to directly update this blog by sending this blog, readers shall now be given live updates from the field as it happens. Join this blog’s Twitter Channel at: twitter.com/teeth

See this report from News which talks about Aurat Foundation’s plans to setup a sms based system for activism:

However, keeping in mind the fact that a majority of the population does not have access to the internet, members at a meeting held at the Aurat Foundation’s office decided to circulate their message of protest through text messages and work towards the restoration of human rights, the judicial system and the removal of the media blackout amongst other issues.

On the other hand, hundreds of people have also been registering their protests at pakvoices.net, gopetition.com and facebook.com

All of this is promising - it shows the resolve of the people and their determination to share information and make the best use of available tools.