State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Here’s another sign that ICT industry in Pakistan is maturing. The first Mobile Commerce conference is being held in Karachi on April 2 2008. The event has a star-studded guest list which includes PTA Chief, mobile companies Mobilink, Warid and Telenor (CEOs will attend), mobile commerce companies such as Amaana, Inov8, senior management from banks (both commercial and State Bank) and a few foreign company executives. Full details are available in this pdf brochure. You can also take a quick look at the image to see participating companies.

The sessions are well planned and include topics such as environment for mobile commerce, role of telcos, micro-finance, security and risk management, new trends and challenges. I expect it to be a very interesting and useful event.

I am looking for feedback about this conference and would appreciate if anyone can share observations and thoughts.

It is inevitable that more and more kids (say ages 8-16) will own a mobile phone. The very qualities which make a mobile phone very useful (personal, connected and media capable) can also make it a cause for concern for parents. How can parents know if their kids are using the phones appropriately? Previously we have talked about some issues but there’s a lot more to discuss about the generation gap, content which ends up on the phone (whether it is live content or from removable media) and the vulnerabilities to which kids can be exposed to.

Results of a recent AT&T survey revealed that 84 percent of consumers believe parental controls and safety tools are extremely or very important in keeping children safe while they use today’s entertainment and communications technologies. Nearly one-third (31 percent) of those adults do not feel that they have adequate knowledge of how to use those tools to protect children from today’s threats.

There was a recent article in New York Times about the generation gap caused by mobile phones in US. It quotes a social psychologist Sherry Turkle (a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has studied the social impact of mobile communications) saying that these trends are likely to continue as cellphones morph into mini hand-held computers, social networking devices and pint-size movie screens. The point made by the story is that parents need to learn about how kids are using new technology. Obviously the situation varies from culture to culture but the trend is the same.

There have been attempts by a few companies to design services which allow parents control over how their kids use mobile phones and services. But there’s only so much that a parent can control and the personal nature of mobile phone makes it very difficult to monitor its usage. As many would argue, it is a social matter which should not be tried to solve using technology. However there is still a case to be made for putting controls over how the phone is used if you are the one paying the bill.

The NYT article adds: Marketers and cellphone makers are only too happy to fill the newest generation gap. Last fall, Firefly Mobile introduced the glowPhone for the preschool set; it has a small keypad with two speed-dial buttons depicting an image of a mother and a father.

Towards this AT&T has Smart Limits which allows parents to set account thresholds and to filter out content. See a flash demo here and keep in mind that it is not a complete solution by any means. Hit the link below to see details about this from AT&T website:

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Osama Hashmi at Green & White on the relationship of startups and Telcos. Telcos are always looking for interesting value-added services to drive up their ARPU and will partner with anyone who can offer such mobile apps. Of course telcos are also known for their control obsession over content & partners.

This is part of a conversation that started in a Startup Insiders session - should a young fledgling firm with a good idea think about building products around the mobile telecom space?

If you have a nice brilliant consumer-focused idea today, you’ll also have a number of options available to implement it. You could realize your idea as a web-2.0 implementation, as a widget, as a facebook / open-social application, as a web-M solution (mobile-focus website), as a handset-only application, or as a specialized value-added service built and offered in close partnership with a telecom operator.

The question is - where and why would you want to work with a telco, when some of the other options (particularly facebook) can offer a much higher potential audience-base and much lower total development costs.

Adnan from PixSense had the best answer I’ve heard about this - and as a backdrop I’ll point to a recent interview by the Mobile Marketing Magazine of the CEO of PixSense, Paul Singh.

The answer, according to Adnan, lies not in what telecos in general are doing with service vendors, but in what they could do in terms of pricing of the service.

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I have talked with friends about the need of a smart tool which allows consumers to compare mobile phone plans based on a user’s preferences and life style. I noticed a simple flash-based tool on Telenor site. Just compare this with the unfriendly page at PTA site which lists everything. Telecom is a complicated industry and an important job of a regulator is to use best tools to make life easy for its audience. Its hard to over-emphasize the importance of Usability when it comes to consumer awareness in emerging telecom markets.

Mobile technology blogs have been reporting about the upcoming version 6.1 of Windows Mobile, likely to be unveiled at CTIA conference next week. In true Microsoft fashion, windows mobile has evolved from a flaky OS with frequent crashes and poor user interface to a more widely accepted OS. Microsoft is working hard to improve the interface and features of windows mobile. iPhone is one of the reasons that windows mobile makeover got accelerated.

I see more and more prototypes being developed on Windows Mobile perhaps because integration with development tools such as visual studio makes it easy to work with. As and end user however, the more important are features and usability.
To that point voice recognition technology from Microsoft has finally improved to a point where its actually usable. I recently tested msn voice search and the performance was reasonable. This remains a hot area for research, obviously. As an example of technology convergence, Microsoft has launched voice-activated SYNC technology for cars which allows you to play a song from your mp3 player collection by saying the name of song and singer. You can also make hands-free calls (no big deal by itself).

Here’s a bit more about the next big release

As far as Windows Mobile 7.0 goes, there are no leaked screen shots as of yet, but big changes are afoot. Microsoft plans to completely redo applications such as Internet Explorer, bringing the mobile browser up to par with Apple’s Mobile Safari. The e-mail and SMS applications are also scheduled for complete rewrites. Microsoft plans to make the user interface even more consumer-friendly.

Citizens of Pakistan have been a victim of Internet censorship many times in recent past. The last attempt by PTCL to block YouTube resulted in side effects for the whole cyberspace. Here’s a review of Access Denied a recent book on this topic. Review is by Bruce Schneier . The book is edited by Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski and Jonathan Zittrain. Thanks to Shahzad Ahmad for sharing this at Pakistan ICT Policy discussion group.

In 1993, Internet pioneer John Gilmore said “the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”, and we believed him. In 1996, cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow issued his ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, and online. He told governments: “You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement that we have true reason to fear.”

At the time, many shared Barlow’s sentiments. The Internet empowered people. It gave them access to information and couldn’t be stopped, blocked or filtered. Give someone access to the Internet, and they have access to everything. Governments that relied on censorship to control their citizens were doomed.

Today, things are very different. Internet censorship is flourishing. Organizations selectively block employees’ access to the Internet. At least 26 countries - mainly in the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the former Soviet Union - selectively block their citizens’ Internet access. Even more countries legislate to control what can and cannot be said, downloaded or linked to. “You have no sovereignty where we gather,” said Barlow. Oh yes we do, the governments of the world have replied.

Access Denied is a survey of the practice of Internet filtering, and a sourcebook of details about the countries that engage in the practice. It is written by researchers of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI; http://www.opennet. net), an organization that is dedicated to documenting global Internet filtering around the world.

The first half of the book comprises essays written by ONI researchers on the politics, practice, technology, legality and social effects of Internet filtering. There are three basic rationales for Internet censorship: politics and power; social norms, morals and religion; and security concerns.

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Guest Post By Sohaib Athar

I, the good cop, mailed a long rant to the PTCL Broadband manager, Mr. Ali Raza Baloch, last week, after getting his email from the helpline.

He forwarded my complaint to a couple of relevant people, asking them to help me out, but that didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, a friend, the bad cop, sent a written complaint to PTA - the PTA people wrote a letter to PTCL, and PTCL called my friend, and promised they will upgrade ‘tomorrow’ - which happened to be a local holiday, so ‘tomorrow’ never came.

Today, my friend went in person to the Broadband office, spent two hours there, met Ali Raza face-to-face and explained the situation to him. Ali Raza contacted his team, found out that my friend’s upgrade was stuck in Islamabad somehow, and got the wheels in motion for him. My friend did manage to get my connection upgraded in the process though - so when I woke up today, I found my modem connected at 510kbps.

So, for anyone who is desperate to get the promised upgrade, you can be proactive and follow the same route instead of waiting for something that PTCL owes you but is reluctant to provide. I’m getting about an 80% throughput - 410kbps or so, which is good enough for jerk-free Youtube, and the upload speed of 300kbps is helping me save a lot of time as well. 20$ for 512kbps is still about 6 times more expensive than the 50$ for 6mbps that my American friends enjoy, but I hope we will get there eventually. Thank god for competition.

I can’t tell you how many times has a dead battery disappointed me or someone I know. Despite progress in many areas of consumer electronics, there have been few battery breakthroughs recently. No wonder batteries are responsible for many of consumer frustrations with gadgets. Sounds too good to be true but take a look at this award-winning idea of a universal green battery. This eco-friendly product concept was a recent winner of the Greener Gadgets Competition in New York.

Even though buying third-party batteries is way cheaper now than before it is still a hassle. And if you don’t like the clutter of chargers with their cords, this is a great tool. Who knows if the “one battery works everywhere” concept will prove to be realistic or not as there are so many industry issues possible to its adaptation.

As with other green technologies this is not going to be cheap but I am sure it will catch on pretty fast and prices will fall once China takes over its production :)

Green Cell is a concept with a single simple idea: use safe, standardized rechargeable batteries in all portable gadgets. The environment would benefit from fewer batteries being thrown away, and you’d need fewer chargers for all your gear.

For those of us who struggle with the continuous competing demands of business and are responsible for design and implementation of technology, there are some great points in this post about Fluid Architecture by Simeon Simeonov. If I were to mention one take-away it would be the 3 things Simeon mentions as the key to success for fluid architecture: good software architecture, continuous process improvement component and a cultural component.

I am glad that Wordpress, the powerful software which enables this blog, gets a well-deserved praise.

Simeon Simeonov at High Contrast.

Sometimes, trading speed and efficiency now for cost and effort later helps startups reach some form of initial scale which buys them either enough capital or time to fix things before the next stage of growth. Other times, the same repeated trade-off puts them farther and farther behind the 8-ball. Nowhere is this more visible then when a product (or site) has to go through a major re-architecture (re-platforming/redesign).

Have you heard about Amazon’s latest re-platforming project? No? Not surprisingly since Amazon hasn’t had one of those… Great products/sites can evolve and take on best-of-breed capabilities/ technologies in a way that’s almost transparent to their users. Amazon is a great example. The site is constantly being worked upon by lots of people. Wordpress is another great example, showing the power of the open-source community. Good products/sites can be re-architected or re-platformed with relatively benign levels of user disruption. MySpace is a good example. MySpace had to significantly evolve their initial architecture (a web site built on one ColdFusion server) to end up where they are now. Others, say, the first-generation Friendster and many e-commerce sites, make it painfully obvious to their customers that it’s taking them too long to evolve & improve. Some die in the process.

IA common pattern is that many successful technology companies have figured how to use what I like to call fluid architecture to manage the balance of trade-offs between the present and the future. Fluid architecture is not just about software. The core certainly is about good software architecture but there is also a continuous improvement process component and a cultural component. The cultural element has to do with two things: (a) a mindset of ongoing, explicit, open and honest discussion about the trade-offs that are being made and their future implications and (b) a commitment at all levels of the organization (not just inside the product group) to not end up behind the 8-ball. Companies that embrace this broader concept of fluid architecture can rebuild themselves on the go and move at the pace of today’s business.

No matter whether one is a business executive or a technology expert, personal face-to-face networking is an important aspect of professional development. In Pakistan we are beginning to warm up to this approach. Warid recently arranged a CIO forum in Lahore, which seems to be limited to Warid’s executives and business partners (details are below). It will take a while to build the trust which brings competitive companies together to discuss solutions to common issues. I hope that in near future CIOs from all major telecom companies in Pakistan can come together and promote indigenous solutions.

From a press release sent to me by Warid’s public relations team.

Wateen Telecom and Warid Telecom under the Warid Telecom International umbrella are quickly evolving as major players in the emerging markets of South Asia, Africa and now Eastern Europe. The exponential growth and addition of complex set of services also poses CIOs with a number of challenges. Effective use of technology, alignment with business goals, standardization and recognition of emerging trends are just some of these challenges.

WTI CIO Forum has been created to address these challenges. The main objective of this forum is to bring together the IT management from across the group to share their experiences, discuss the technology roadmap, talk about various emerging industry trends and try to leverage a synergy that exists in various projects and operations.

Along with other top-level industry executives from major companies, Mr. Marwan Zawaydeh, Board of Director and CEO of Warid Telecom, Mr. Salman Khurram, Head of IT at Wateen Telecom, and Mr. Mohammad Ali, GM IT Warid Telecom, spoke at the forum. The forum partners included International Turnkey Systems, TechAccess, and Cisco.

Technology often impacts society in many ways. Some times new technologies such as mobile phones come with unintended consequences. Regardless of whether you like that or not, you need to understand and deal with the change. Ignorance and avoidance is not an option.

Take Bluetooth as one example. The anonymous messaging capabilities using Bluetooth has created a new form of interaction between boys and girls in conservative Middle East. See this story from Marketplace.org’s special report from Middle East. I assume this is valid for Pakistan to some degree as well.

This is a topic with many aspects and view points will vary. However the fact remains that the youth of today have grown up with a whole new set of gadgets. The new modes of communication are part of their lifestyle. There will be applications to capture their attention, advertising to entice them. At the same time rest of the society has to adapt to this change and provide guidance to youth. The parental controls of the past will no longer work.

The recent BlackBerry security concerns raised by Indian Govt have been reported widely in press. To me it seems that governments around the world are struggling with controlling technology. Just a few weeks ago Pakistan made the headlines when PTCL inadvertently caused the youtube outage. Some wondered if the BlackBerry problems could spill over to Pakistan. I remember reading at TGP that security was the reason for the delay in introducing BB services in Pakistan … so hopefully we are past this obstacle.

Obviously the old-school bureaucracies have a hard time keeping up with the fast pace of technology. It seems that one fine day the Indian government realized that there’s a threat, reacted hastily and scared the market! To be fair, most government agencies tend to work in that mode.

Excerpt from WSJ:

Indian telecommunications operators are negotiating with the government on a framework for BlackBerry usage that will allow the Indian market to expand but also meet concerns for national security.

India’s government isn’t comfortable with the way information transmitted via BlackBerry is encrypted because it’s too complex to be monitored, according to one industry official. The fear is that information can’t be monitored and that this could be a security risk.

These worries had caused some to speculate that India’s government might opt to block BlackBerry messages. But India’s telecommunications secretary Siddhartha Behura downplayed the prospect, saying Friday that “there is no question of banning at this point,” according to Reuters. He said the government is talking to telecom operators and to BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion Ltd. of Canada.