State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

As if Pakistan needed one more issue, we have the botched YouTube blockage attempt which caused anger and frustration in Pakistan, plenty of confusion and some conflicting emotions, and possibly a YouTube outage. This BBC report alleges that YouTube went down for 2 hours because of the technical misunderstanding by PCCW, an Asian ISP. But the outage itself, if any, is less interesting to me. My take is that now that global media is paying attention to this lets use this opportunity to deal with this persistent Internet blcoking issue in Pakistan and turn things around. Enough has been written already so I will point out some of the items of interest here and invite you to share your thoughts.

I agree with my friend Tee Emm who wrote a post: The Tube Trouble and Why its a Good News

The persistent problem (of Internet censorship done the wrong way) is not being intermittently flashed to us any more - instead, this event throws it right into our faces.

That Internet censorship is bad and useless is an established fact but that it happens worldwide in both developing and developed worlds is even more established fact. In the absence of compelling Internet applications in Pakistan, Internet remains the sole killer application for the broadband mass uptake the government appears to be so concerned about.

Adil Najam has repeatedly written about the censorship and the flawed approach where government assumes the role of nation’s moral guardian role. Adil points to the possible political motivation for the ban at Pakistaniat.com:

The general opinion is that th ban is more “political” than “cultural”. A large number of videos with actual footages of electoral rigging were placed on YouTube and the view is that the “ban” or the “technical difficulties” that have come up are really a way to distract attention in Pakistan away from these videos, at least for the time being.

The ban may already be over but the repercussions will be there for a while. The technical angle to the Internet censorship and limitations of the Internet infrastructure in Pakistan is important as well. I am sure Google is looking into this as well. Since I don’t live in Pakistan and can’t experience it first hand I’ll refer back to Tee Emm’s post:

Now is the time stop using Cisco ACLs and use layer 4 solutions where the filtering must happen.

I believe this will force the PTA and the government (and the trigger happy PTCL’s PIE) to upgrade their infrastructures so that the delicate balance between civil liberties and our societal sensitivities is well kept.

Related Items:

• News.com on Pakistan’s role in YouTube utage
• Pakistan hijacks YouTube
• Telecom Grid Pakistan
• Technorati

$99 unlimited calling plans have been recently introduced in the US by 3 of the largest wireless carriers. This has been making headlines in the US media and blogs. Many thought such plans will not come this soon as the US wireless industry has been very slow to adopt consumer-friendly trends. I started thinking whether this kind of flat rate unlimited calling plan will ever make sense in Pakistan? If so, for how much? Is Rs.10,000 a reasonable number?

Back to the US market - there are a number of analysts who think that this price war is going to hurt the wireless carriers’ bottom line. These announcements sent the shares of the wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T down.

I see this as an interesting experiment which these large companies can afford. It will squeeze companies like Sprint who are already struggling - and may be that is part of the intended impact. Interestingly a large percentage of the revenue grwoth of these wireless companies is from data usage, for which the plans are different from calling plans. For instance Verizon will offer customers monthly data plan options of 50 MB for $39.99 a month or 5 GB for $59.99 a month.

I am interested in a true flat rate unlimited data and voice plan - which should make a phone like BlackBerry an even more attractive choice!