State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

First Global TeleCON conference was held in Karachi Sheraton on April 29-30. The organizer’s website has full agenda details and the summary is provided below. The organizers, Shamrock Conferences, deserve credit for sharing the agenda and making the presentations available online. The impressive thing about this conference was that there were many senior level speakers representing all stakeholders (industry, government, academia, consumers) in Pakistan telecom. The discussion was organized along the following tracks:

• Policy & Regulatory Framework
• Connectivity & Mobility
• Putting Customers First
• Converging Technology & Infrastructure into Business
• Preparing Today for Tomorrow
• Role Playing in Telecom Industry

I browsed through a few presentations and found the presentations on policy issues, consumer protection and challenges for emerging markets to be educational and interesting. In the coming days I’ll write more about them. There were of course some other talks (for example by PTA and mobile companies) which fell in the category of self-promotion. I wonder if this conference was a mere networking event or was there some other purpose to it?