Archive for September 17th, 2008

PTCL International Plus Call Package: Less Than A Rupee Per Minute

Published by Babar Bhatti on September 17, 2008 under PTCL, Pakistan, Telecommunications

If you make frequent international calls from Pakistan to Australia, USA, UK, Canada or China then this is a great package for you. Even for someone making calls for say 15 minutes a day (450 minutes per month x Rs.2/min = Rs. 900) this is still a good deal as you get a much bigger bucket of minutes for a bit more. This rate certainly beats any rate for calling Pakistan from abroad. What a contrast from a few years ago when calls from Pakistan used to be more expensive than calls to Pakistan. This reversal can be attributed to the falling cost of VOIP and high termination rate charged by Pakistan.

It would be nice if PTCL provided an easy way of keeping track of your minutes …

Zong Brand Mixup

Published by Babar Bhatti on September 17, 2008 under Business, China, Marketing, Mobile Companies, Mobile Phones, Telecommunications, Zong, blogging

Last week going through Tech Crunch site, I came across a Switzerland based mobile services start-up with the name Zong. Of course this is not the same as the Pakistani mobile company Zong formerly known as Paktel. But this does muddle up things a bit from branding and marketing point of view.

This start-up is in the business of mobile payments and they own the zong.com domain. This was noticed by others.  The confusing part for Pakistani public was pointed out at this post by Awab Alvi: the mysterious redirection of the Zong.com site to Wikipedia page on Pakistan — only for users inside Pakistan. Interesting, I wonder who is responsible for this!

China Mobile must have known about this when they started their re-branding earlier this year. Did China Mobile ever try to buy the domain out? Or may be they did not care about a small European start-up. One thing is certain: Zong mobile payments will not be selling their solution to Zong Pakistan anytime soon. Click below for more about the startup.

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