State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

As a regular BlackBerry user myself, I am pleased to see that Pakistani consumers now have much better choices for using BlackBerry. Warid has started offering BlackBerry and that too - unlocked. This year has seen two new entrants for BlackBerry service in Pakistan: Ufone and Warid.

Both Ufone and Warid are hurting with subscriber growth and low ARPUs and could use more business subscribers. The introduction of BlackBerry service should definitely help them. With more competition for BlackBerry the rates and services are going to converge to a stable point.

It is going to be a lot less painful for foreigners and expat Pakistanis to bring in their BlacBerries to Pakistan.Telenor is the only remaining telco without a BalckBerrry offering - as I wrote in my last BlackBerry post and other bloggers are asking too - but its only a matter of time as they are probably busy with handling their fast pace of growth.

This brings me to the big picture view of Smart phone market in Pakistan. So the guys at RIM have done a good job with the otherwise Nokia dominated Pakistani market. I guess this is their global plan: get people hooked on to BlackBerries before Apple starts invading their territory. Good work. Now we need to see some cool apps customized for Pakistani market - how are we doing there?

Related Posts:

Blackberry in Pakistan/

Ufone joins blackberry club in Pakistan

The far-flung Northern areas have been a major beneficiary of the changing telecommunication landscape in Pakistan. Ignore for a long time, these areas have been getting attention from the mobile phone companies. After Mobilink and Telenor, Zong has also launched its services in the beautiful cities of Gilgit, Hunza, Skardu, Besharn and Sust. I am sure the residents of the region are enjoying this increase in competition and the choices they have now.

According to the press release, Zong has about 3000 cell tower sites today and the plan to have 10,000 sites by the end of 2009. I found it interesting that Zong’s COO referred to their experience of working in mountainous regions. Most of the time we tend to think about Zong’s huge size and deep pockets, but there’s more to it!

“We believe Zong will have a clear edge over the competition in the Northern Areas especially, as China Mobile has huge experience of network operation in similar high mountainous areas in China itself,” stated Zafar Usmani, the COO of CMPak Ltd. The region now being covered by Zong borders with China, with the Karakoram Highway (old Silk Route) playing a vital role in freight transportation. ZONG is also working towards ensuring the Highway’s coverage.

Guest Post By Aamir Attaa

Pakistan Telecom industry has now matured enough to gain over 85 million cellular subscribers. We can see cellular companies expanding their networks to explore un-served regions; which gives a clear indication of reaching their limits in urban areas. This may result into a steep decline in foreign direct investments coming into country.

Until now, we were entertained well by cellular companies, who employed huge workforce, brought in investments and made good amount of contribution towards our national economy through taxes.

But now, when we see revenues coming from cellular companies have poised, Government of Pakistan should un-turn new possibilities to bring in the investment into country. Maybe we are already late, but now we can’t delay any further in pulling mobile phone manufacturers to setup manufacturing plants in Pakistan. These manufacturing plants will not only meet our local needs but they may also earn the country few bucks through mobile phone exports and save valuable foreign exchange used for imports of handsets.

Obviously these landmarks can’t be achieved in days, but the regulator and the government have to follow a strategy that might attract mobile phone manufacturers to come into Pakistan. We can follow Indian Model, where they have mobile phone manufacturing facilities of almost all mainstream handset manufactures.

Pakistan’s weak economic infrastructure, poor supplies, heavy taxes and discouraging policies are never going to allow any handset manufacture to invest in Pakistan. On other hands, India cut import duties and corporate tax rates, new highways, rail lines, and airports were built, furthermore, they gave the investors a sense of security and consequently Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG Electronics, ZTE, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, and so many others got there and harvested the fruits of low cost labor and other added benefits of Indian land.

Once deployed, handset plant comes with a package that can do wonders to any economy, as they bring in other industries along, such as, component manufacturers, circuit designers, accessories, packaging, software industry to cater mobile software requirements, R&D and so on.

So the roadmap is there, requirement is there, and possibilities are there…what we can do is to get them in quick time to further strengthen telecom industry in specific and economy in general.

Related Posts:

Pakistanis spend usd 1 billion a year on imported mobile phones
Pakistan lucrative market for mobile handset makers

I could not believe this when I saw it at Telecom Grid Pakistan, where an active discussion is brewing about this one-sided irrational decision. This reminds of the monopolistic telecom policies from a few years ago - are we sliding back to that drak era? Quoting Tariq’s email to Pakistan ICT Policy group:

PTCL used to have one tariff for leased circuits for 0-200 km range. Now, they have chopped it down four categories 0-50, 51-100, 101-150 and 151-200. The lower distances have the highest tariff hike. Hence, essentially, PTCL has hit the competition where it hurts the most - shorter circuits that make the nitty gritty of the competitions’ network. The competion - Mobilink, Wateen, Multinet - who have shining new long distance networks,  these shorter circuits were still the missing pieces and till now they were making sense to get from PTCL where their own networks were not available. With this hike, PTCL has essentially taken away the most essentially elements of these long haul networks putting at risk the entire canvas of rudundant, new age fiber network put up by the new competition.

PTA is auctioning UAN numbers. It is good for PTA that they found another lucrative way to charge 160K for a number. See details at this URL for online submission. Regardless of one’s views about universal access number pricing, I was disappointed by the poor usability and overall, low quality of the site - even by PTA standards. The links at the top right don’t work - contact us button tries to sign you out and shows you a 404 error. More concerning is the fact that the site requires you to upload sensitive personal documents (NTN, NIC and bank documents) but the site does not even have SSL.

Syed Mohammad Ali writes about development and mobile telecommunication in Pakistan and developing countries, quoting the Base Of Pyramid (BoP) research work by LIRNEAsia. Excerpts from his article at Daily Times:

Numerous studies have pointed towards the positive relationship between phone penetration and national incomes.

But there are also simultaneous concerns that ICT benefits are only being availed by a small segment of populations within the developing world. Here we consider on-ground impacts that a specific communication technology like mobile phones can have on the lives of common people.

Many more poor people are now able to afford phones within the region. They seem to consider it efficient to have phone access, which makes sense, since phones can help even poor people save time and effort by avoiding making physical trips to convey a message or get required information.

On economic benefits and trust on M-commerce:

It seems logical to assume that saving time and effort also translates into economic savings. However, the poor themselves do not generally relate phone access to tangible economic gains yet. While some small scale studies have actually managed to quantify the benefits that a phone can have, in some Indian fisheries and among agricultural workers in Sri Lanka who are using phones to get better prices for their products, researchers point to an apparent disconnect in poor people’s perceptions concerning the economic value of a phone. Perhaps this is so because in most emerging and developing countries, people still prefer physical interactions for their financial dealings. This is an interesting issue meriting further attention, especially in the coming era of mobile payments.

One wonders, for instance, if poor people will ever start to trust an SMS confirmation as opposed to a hand-to-hand transfer of money. Expatriates from Bangladesh seem to have overcome this fear, and the Grameen Bank has been working with the government to provide expatriates the chance to send money to their relatives back home using mobile phones.

With the recent upgrade of this blog to the latest version of Wordpress, there was an issue with the blog feed. That caused failure of the email delivery and the feed to disappear from aggregators such as Bloggers.Pk. I have fixed the issue and updated the feed link in the sidebar. Please let me know if you still have issues with receiving feed through email or via your feed aggregator. Here’s the correct address for the feed: Telecompk.net/feed

Thanks for bearing with me.

 

Here’s a nice summary view of how people are using iPhone today. (source: Morgan Stanley Tech Research)

On a related note, adoption by businesses is a major goal for Apple. See this Computerworld article on whether iPhone will be able to win over the resistance by enterprise and their IT support groups?

Companies need to obtain digital certificates for homegrown applications from Apple, then transmit the applications to Macs and PCs running iTunes. Individual iPhones have to be connected via a cable to an iTunes-equipped desktop computer in order to synchronize with the software and get access to the applications.

The direct-connect synchronization plan left IT managers such as Vivek Kundra, chief technology officer for the District of Columbia, looking for more options from Apple.

Kundra is beta-testing about 15 first-generation iPhones along with the iPhone 2.0 software that Apple announced earlier this year. The $199 price tag for the entry-level iPhone 3G will make the device “a lot more palatable for the enterprise,” he said.

Read more »

Nokia has an answer to the recent threats from Google and Apple: transform Symbian to an open-source app platform. This is a major development for the developers of mobile applications. One thing is clear: the upcoming battle is mainly about the apps, not about handsets (or the mobile network operators) . From both technology and business perspective, application development teams have an important decision to make: Which platform is their first priority: iPhone, Windows, Android or Symbian? Whoever can convince the best developers to write the killer apps on their platform is likely to be the dominant player. The game just got more interesting!

See this post from GigaOm on this development and the comparison below from TechCrunch (would be nice to have blackberry there).

A very good article from Businessweek on Nokia’s move.

Nokia announced a plan on June 24 2008 to buy the 52.1% of shares it doesn’t already own in London-based Symbian, the leading maker of operating system software for advanced mobile phones. In an industry-shifting move, Nokia will create an open-source foundation that will give away the resulting software for free to other handset makers.

Until now, Symbian has been owned by a consortium of rivals including Nokia, Sony (SNE), Ericsson (ERIC), Panasonic (MC), Siemens (SI), and Samsung. The company was set up a decade ago to develop an independent software platform for smartphones. And indeed, Symbian software is now used in more than half of all such devices, relegating rivals such as Microsoft’s pint-size Windows Mobile to a thin slice of the market.

But in the past year, the complexion of the industry has shifted as a new crop of rivals, most using open-source Linux software, have barged in. Nokia and the newcomers are now locked in a high-stakes battle whose outcome could shape the future of mobile communication—and by extension, of the Internet, as a growing number of consumers around the world access the Web from handheld devices (BusinessWeek.com, 2/12/08).

The new Symbian Foundation will be steered by a board of 10 members: five from phone manufacturers Nokia, LG Electronics, Motorola (MOT), Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, and five from network operators and chipmakers AT&T (T), NTT DoCoMo (DCM), Vodafone (VOD), STMicroelectronics (STM), and Texas Instruments (TXN). The goal? “To be the most widely used platform in the world,” said Nigel Clifford, Symbian’s chief executive, during a London press conference on June 24.

Moving into Mass Market

But there’s more to it than that. In an era of emerging wireless applications, a platform is merely the jumping-off point. The real focus in the industry is shifting from what’s inside the phone to the snazzy online stuff a handset can access over the air—from mobile music and photo sharing to GPS and location-based services. That’s why Nokia is racing to deliver all manner of such offerings through a combination of in-house development and aggressive acquisitions. On June 23, for instance, it bought Berlin-based Plazes, which offers mobile social networking.

Read more »

Dual-band, dual-SIM on the same phone? This Coolpad looks like a really cool phone for travelers and for people who love to swap out SIMs often. Lets see if it delivers as promised. As reported at CNET:

For the frequent travelers, remaining contactable via mobile is serious business. Should you use roaming to remain in contact but pay exorbitant fees just to call a local number? Or switch your SIM card to a local account and risk missing important calls? Most compromise by having two phones, which frankly, is no solution at all.

Coolpad phones claim to be the first in the market with dual-SIM devices that not only work with more than one network, but can even switch between GSM and CDMA accounts without batting an eye. Currently retailing in Indonesia, China and Africa, handsets range from US$100 to US$350, with premium models going for as high as US$1,000. Granted the only drawback we’ve seen so far is the lack of 3.5G connectivity, but Coolpad phones will save you a bundle in roaming fees.

Dashwire 2.0 is out and offers a full suite of mobile phone and web sync features. I tested it with a friend of mine who has windows mobile phone tested their service today and we found it interesting and useful but not without issues and limitations. As I have written in the past, with all the gadgets at work and home, getting your life in sync is a major problem. There are a bunch of solutions out there (Zyb, Shozu etc) but not a clear winner - yet. Apple obviously saw this gap and is offering a subscription service - MobileMe which should be a big hit.

Features, availability and reliability - all play important role in driving usage and adoption. Network and data plan availability is of course importnat too. See a description from Dashwire site and this review from Engadget. Also check out their blog, especially the post on connected services.

Your phone content — contacts, text messages, calls, photos, videos, Internet favorites, speed dials, ringtone, and wallpaper — is seamlessly uploaded from your phone and safely stored online in your Dashwire account.

With Dashwire, you can…

• Send and receive text messages from your computer without picking up your phone
• Automatically upload photos and videos captured on the go to easily organize and share with your friends
• Add an address book contact on your computer and have it instantly appear on your phone
• Easily set Internet favorites, ringtones, wallpapers, and speed dials – in seconds from your computer

Saw this ad in Dawn and youtube. The network quality (and signal coverage strength) is something which leading mobile companies love to market. I have seen Verizon and ATT use this advertising approach this in the US. Mobilink is taking a similar approach to remind its target customers about the reliability, extent and reach of Mobilink’s network. Roadside assistance, South Asian style.

Oh by the way, the iPhone shown in the ad is another intersting touch. So now, does it mean that we will see more and more iPhones in mobile ads? or does it also mean that Mobilink is working to become the iPhone carrier in Pakistan?