State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

During the many years of telecom industry’s growth, PTA has never been able to clearly define a reasonable VOIP policy. Recently PTA asked ISPs to detect and monitor traffic for voice over internet protocol and report any illegal usage. The Internet Services Providers of Pakistan (ISPAK) has taken a position against PTA directives asking them to set up expensive systems for the detection and monitoring of illegal voices traffic available unlimited on internet. Daily Times reports:

ISPAK Convener Wahaj us Siraj said PTA has invested a huge amount of operators’ contribution for installation of such a facility and this matter has to be tackled by PTA itself instead of passing on additional burden on ISPs. He said the ISPs could install the VoIP monitoring and mitigating facility if PTA provides funding for such a facility as the industry is already in debt due to selling below the costs and anti competitive practices. There are more than 50 ISPs operating across the country. As per policy, they contributed 0.5 percent of their revenue to Universal Service Fund (USF); 0.1 percent on the account of Research and Development and hundreds of thousands of fee charges for renewal of licences. ISPs cannot take any action against any customer doing illegal VoIP as they are lacking statutory powers to do so, he said and added that if PTA informs of illegal activity done by any customer to the concerned ISP, the ISPs’ action can only be limited to locking that customer’s account and providing customer details to PTA.

ISPs also termed PTA’s action of blocking the IP addresses on internet gateways without any prior notification and evidence as insufficient. They said they had been suffering badly, which has been brought to the notice many times in recent past to the regulator.

PTA has its automated blocking of IP addresses that carry illegal voice traffic that is termination and/or origination of voice packets in a bid to check grey traffic flowing into the country

On the other hand, Chairman PTA Dr Muhammad Yaseen told Daily Times that setting up of VoIP system is not a rocket science that could not be done by ISPs without the assistance of authority.

They only need to install software on their network to block illegal traffic of voices, which they are reluctant to do, he said adding that there are scores of culprits violating authority’s law under the very nose of ISPs. Dr Yaseen added that the authority has warned all the ISPs again and it has decided to conduct massive operation against all the illegal traffic users as per prescribed laws. He further said the ISPs should cooperate with the authority to stop illegal practices instead of supporting users’ violating watchdog’s laws.

PTA announced publicly that all (registered) call centres should provide their IP addresses to PSEB to make sure that their voice traffic is not blocked. Since the inception of technical facility in May 2008 at the PTA, the IP addresses found to be involved in illegal activities were being blocked manually and in the process, over 14 million minutes (worth around Rs 100 million) have been saved on monthly basis. Now these would be automatically blocked if any IP, not authorised to carry voice is found doing so. Under the current policy, only LDIs and international call centres are authorised to carry voice across national boundaries.

Just when things seemed to be going well, we have yet another outage and this time the repair time line is unknown. Other than Pakistan, India, Middle East and Taiwan are hit. This is getting a lot of media attention (see this Gizmodo post). Dawn reports:

Internet service and call center operations in Pakistan suffered fluctuation on Friday night after at least two of the four undersea optic-fibre communications cables were damaged, officials said.

They said initially a fault was reported in the Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-3 (SEA-ME-WE-3) optic-fibre link near Alexandria (Egypt). It was fixed within a ‘few hours’.

“Later, we were informed that the cable of our second undersea fibre link called SEA-ME-WE-4 had been damaged,” said Sikandar Naqi, Senior Executive Vice President, Corporate Development and Special Projects, of Pakistan Telecommunication Company (PTCL), the country’s only internet backbone provider.

“The damaged cable is 1,800 nautical miles away from our seashore and an exact timeframe cannot be given for its repair.”

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Reports have indicated that three major undersea cables, SEA-ME-WE 4 (SMW4), SEA-ME-WE 3 (SMW3) and FLAG EA went out around early morning on Friday. The cables were cut in the Mediterranean between Egypt and Italy. SMW4 and SMW3 are owned by a group of telephone companies from around the world; where as FLAG EA is owned by Reliance Globalcom. These cables carry a high percentage of voice and data traffic between Europe, Middle-East and Asia.

SMW4 and FLAG were also among the five cables that faced a similar damage earlier this year but at that time SMW3 was used to re-route traffic.

France telecom has reported that around 14 countries have been majorly hit by these cable slashes. An estimate shows a following impact on traffic|:

• Saudi Arabia: 55% out of service
• Djibouti: 71% out of service
• Egypt: 52% out of service
• United Arab Emirates: 68% out of service
• India: 82% out of service
• Lebanon: 16% out of service
• Malaysia: 42% out of service
• Maldives: 100% out of service
• Pakistan: 51% out of service
• Qatar: 73% out of service
• Syria: 36% out of service
• Taiwan: 39% out of service
• Yemen: 38% out of service
• Zambia: 62% out of service

Following the incidence in Pakistan, internet services and call center operations experienced disruption. The country had four links from different routes, PTCL (country’s only internet backbone service provider) was relying on undersea fiber cable from Singapore and there was no major complaint of service disruption.

“We have the capacity to cater for the overall demand of bandwidth in the country from any link. Secondly, we don’t see the problem staying for long. The situation will become normal within the shortest possible time.”
Sikandar Naqi
Senior Executive Vice President
PTCL

On the contrary, industrial and cooperate sector relaying heavily on internet services showed a different picture, for them the problem is serious as the required level of bandwidth is not achieved.

Call centers and software houses are facing serious problems; the alternative provided by the PTCL has not met satisfactorily the needs of the corporate users.”

Wahajus Sairaj
Convenor
ISPs Association of Pakistan (ISPAK)

The relief mission has already begun and priority will be given to the recovery of the Sea- Me-We 4 cable, then on the Sea-Me-We 3.By December 25th, Sea- Me-We 4 could be operating. By December 31st, the situation should be back to normal.

Source: France Telecom and DAWN News.

There has been a lot of discussion around the customer service quality and the fact that now some phone companies charge you a nominal amount when you call for service. I believe that it is not a good trend for consumers that they have to pay for a genuine service call. But there’s another factor: all the time you spend on the phone, especially when you have to deal with the IVR system.

These automated call flows are a necessity of modern businesses. For any large business which runs a call center, operational efficiency in call centers is critical and a down time of a few minutes is a huge issue. Keeping calls brief and using automated systems allows companies to keep the costs under control. Providing online information or other ways of avoiding calls (by using online chat etc) is important as well. For consumers however, it is a big pain go through the IVR maze.

Telenor takes an interesting approach: on their website they publish a number of IVR maps. See above for talkshawk map. I am sure this is helpful for some people but some of these maps can be so complex that it can be a discouragement for callers. What do you think?

I am pleased to share a report on Telecom Opportunities in Pakistan. It was prepared by Salman Ansari in Aug 2007 for Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA). I am thankful to Ansari Sahib for sharing this useful report with all of us. I believe that reports like this which present the facts and highlight the progress made in the telecom sector of Pakistan are extremely valuable - especially for those who are from outside Pakistan and are looking for a compact summary of Pakistan telecom sector.

The report provides a concise and fact-based overview of the economy, telecom road map, regulatory environment, telecom infrastructure (broadband, international connectivity), licence and spectrum situation, investment landscape, mergers and acquisitions and of course - the opportunities, as the excerpt below shows:

All this signals opportunities in the Traditional and Value Added sectors for not only creating new businesses by riding on these systems but also to be a part of new licenses which are being reviewed. These include MVNO, Regional Hosting, Call Centers, Telecenters, Video Conferencing, Content aggregation, Converged networks, etc. On another plane, the Regulatory environment permits spectrum trading, Mergers and Acquisitions as well as entry via Private equity arrangements. The market opening has nearly doubled the sector revenues and this trend is expected to grow.

The annex has a list of licensed operators as well. Obviously this an evergreen document and one should keep in mind that the numbers represent Aug 2007 and have changed during the last 12 months.

The call centers in Pakistan are under scruity by the “Vigilance Cell” of PTA. A recent directive posted on the PTA siteasks call centers to provide IP addresses and gateway information to PTA by August 27. Apparently there were suspicions that call centers are abusing their telecom/bandwidth facilities for purposes other than what they were. This initiative is in cooperation with Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) which is the government owned trade organization for promotion of software and call center industry in Pakistan.

As a regulator, PTA has a mandate to ensure that call centers are operating within the specified guidelines. For this purpose it may ask for information about its operations, technology and business. I hope that this process of compliance will not become a burden for the small number of call centers operating in Pakistan. Daily Times quoted the President of Association of Call Centre Operators (ACCO) Pakistan as saying that he lauds the PTA’s move.

All is good if it ends here. But I think that this cat and mouse game will continue to play for a while as those who are trying to trick the system will probably find ways to evade the vigilance cell.

From Jehan Ara’s blog, In The Line Of Wire. I am glad to see that the concept of privacy has started getting some attention.

Good development. PTA has proposed a few actions for dealing with spam. This includes spams SMS, emails and unwanted calls. See the proposal here or get it from PTA website. I doubt that a fine of 300 Rs will discourage professional spammers. Legitimate companies should start working on their opt-in lists.

It is proposed that a do not call register (DNC) may be maintained by telecom operators. The DNC Register will be a database having the list of all telephone numbers of the subscribers who do not want to receive unsolicited calls. After the establishment of DNC register a subscriber who does not wish to receive Unsolicited calls, can register their telephone number with their telecom service provider to be included in the DNC.

Operator shall upload the number to the DNC within 45 days of receipt. The Telemarketer will have to verify their calling mobile numbers list with the DNC register before making a call. An amount of Rs 300/- per call/message should be prescribed to discourage telemarketers who make calls to numbers registered in Do Not Call list. The defaulter telemarketer will face legal action.The impact of imposing a higher charge for calls and messages which have a commercial purpose attached to them will to some extent ensure that only legitimate calls are made i.e calls to recipients who do not have any problem with attending commercial calls.

Awareness is the key to fighting the spam problem. There are a number of channels listed by PTA but surprisingly blogs and other new media is not mentioned.

The Authority puts forward a media campaign check list which shall be followed by the Authority in collaboration with operators to create spam awareness:
  a) Public awareness activities to target users first and foremost, but also large corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises, direct marketers and online operators.
  b) General awareness activities to be posted on the Web or other media such as television, newspapers and magazines. Brochures may be distributed in schools, made available on all operators’ websites, and also distributed as a leaflet in IT magazines. Educational cartoons about spam, unsolicited and obnoxious calls controlling and reporting and online security broadcast.

Telecenters have been a major source for telecom activity and for bridging the digital divide in developing countries. I came across a group called Telecentre.org which is focussed on helping communities and telecenters.  

In their own words Telecentre.org is a community of people and organizations committed increasing the social and economic impact of telecentres around the world. I ran a search on Pakistan and saw some interesting articles from the past couple of years. I’ll mention one story here about Pakistan Telecenter Initiative or PTI. As it is described on the site, PTI is a Civil Society Group carrying forward dialogues and actions in support of Pakistan’s upcoming massive rural Telecenter movement. This is interesting information which I was not aware of

Read on to learn a bit more about Telecenter.org, taken from the ‘About’ section of their site.

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A reader of the blog shared a very interesting article about dealing with telemarketers. Also see previous post on the topic of unwanted calls.

The article gives you ideas on what to say and do when you get these annoying marketing callas. For those of you who have been a victim this will make a lot of sense. These tips are mainly for the US market but the general theme can be used in Pakistan and anywhere else!

Here’s some guidance and suggestions from InsideCRM. See the full article on InsideCRM site.

1. Counterpitching: This Web designer suggests that you offer your services to the telemarketer on the other end of the line. Alternatively, you can also pretend to be in the business that they’re selling from and make them feel silly for calling.
2. Time to Fight Back: This article details ways to get back at telemarketers. You can waste their time, attempt conversational techniques and more.
3. Do Not Call: Check out this list for ideas to use when called by a telemarketer. You’ll find toilet humor as well as guilt tactics.
4. How to Deal With Those Damn Telemarketers: Follow these tips when you get a telemarketing call. Some of the most important are: Don’t just hang up, and make sure you say both “no” and “take me off of your list.”
5. Having Fun With Telemarketers: Here, you’ll find 20 fun ideas for making telemarketers wish they’d never called you. Highlights include a marriage proposal and a few ways to waste their time.
6. Anti-Telemarketing Action Kit: This guide from UCAN (Utility Consumers’ Action Network) details ideas for keeping telemarketers at bay. You’ll learn how to hurt them financially, waste their time and get payback.

Here’s one more company claiming to fix the yet unsolved problem of speech recognition on mobile phones. I’d like to see their speech-to-text solution in action or hear from someone who has tried it out. Read the complete article about Vlingo’s voice-recognition interface at Tech Review site. The key differentiators are a) that it uses Hierarchical Language Models and Adaptation techniques and b) you can train this software easily by fixing the text it gives you. And by the way, this article is available in audio as well (registration required). Here are some excerpts:

Vlingo, a startup in Cambridge, MA, is coming to market with a ­simple user interface that provides speech recognition across mobile-phone applications. “We are not developing the core speech-recognition engine,” says cofounder Michael ­Phillips, a former MIT research scientist and founder of SpeechWorks, which developed call-center speech interfaces. “We don’t need to do that again.” Instead, Vlingo takes speech, turns it into text, and provides a simple way to correct errors using the phone’s navigation keys, helping the system “learn.” The user’s spoken words travel over a mobile Internet connection for analysis on Vlingo’s server, sparing the phone the heavy computational work; the transcription appears less than two seconds later.

“Small platforms need speech, and search is a powerful way to find information,” says James Glass, head of the spoken-language systems group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “The combination of the two is very powerful,” he says, adding that Vlingo is working at that frontier.

Mazin Gilbert, executive director of natural­-language processing at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, NJ, says others, including AT&T, are also developing speech interfaces for mobile phones; he thinks one problem will be “providing the right user experience in a cost-­effective, scalable way.”

As communication technologies improve and number of mobile phone subscribers grow in Pakistan, unwanted telemarketing and sales calls and text messages are fast becoming a concern. We have talked about the lack of identity protection measures and almost no regard about one’s personal information in Pakistan before. The recent PTA warning about unwanted and fraudulent SMS was also discussed here. Other bloggers have also written about the marketers who invade people’s privacy and waste time.

Many developed countries have taken steps such as “Do Not Call” databases which prohibits telemarketers to call those people who are on the Do Not Call list. Facing pressure from public, India’s telecom regulator has set up a Do Not Call system to fight against unsolicited telemarketers (See this article for details). It will be interesting to see if it can make a difference there. Usually such Do Not Call systems require significant effort to regulate and punish the offenders, which can make it difficult to work in Pakistan.

Another related problem is that South Asia is the home to a large number of outbound call centers. Many of these unsolicited calls in US or Euorpe originate from abroad … often the accent of the callers provides a hint about the location of the caller. I have personally received unwanted calls and text messages from South Asia, and that too at odd hours.

With mobile advertising on its way, this situation will get a lot worse - so brace yourself and take precautionary measures to safeguard your information. First awareness is the key: Pakistani bloggers need to continue to spread the word. Next, take charge of your information. Ask banks, phone companies and other financial institutions about their data privacy policies and demand that they should not sell your data or else you will take your business elsewhere. It MAY work!

The recent issue of FLARE has a good article about the pain of spam sms and unsolicited calls. Excerpts:

With 63 million subscribers currently and growing rapidly every month, telephony in Pakistan is witnessing an unimaginable boom but carries one terrible downside “Unsolicited calls”. Banks are the biggest offenders. Car loans, home loans, personal loans, even loans to pay off other loans, and an unending list of unsolicited calls subscribers receive daily. More terribly, the tele-sales persons have complete personal and private information about subscribers, including name, business and personal contact details, the bank where you have maintained your account, your company name and even balance of your account and the transactions you have made recently.

“Once your cellular number is exposed to tele-marketers, you will find that there are more calls you get each day, furthermore. A notable increase in the ratio of marketing calls will be seen once you have posted a positive response to any package. This gives a clear feeling that these telemarketing companies share their data with-in their departments or even with other telemarketing companies likely to be based on barter system” said Ali Hassan, Senior Professor at a local university. Banks also arrange data from other sources as well; hotels, restaurants, online communities, directories and yellow pages are the big sources.

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