State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

This Economist article, titled Sensors and Sensitivity, talks about the various interesting studies of data collection from mobile phones.

Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas.
 

If your mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.

They could also be used to gather data in more direct ways. Sensors inside phones, or attached to them, could gather information about temperature, humidity, noise level and so on. More straightforwardly, people can send information from their phones, by voice or text message, to a central repository. This can be a useful way to gather data quickly during a disaster-relief operation, for example, or when tracking the outbreak of a disease. Engineers, biologists, sociologists and aid-workers are now building systems that use handsets to sense, monitor and even predict population movements, environmental hazards and public-health threats.

A good example is InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters), a non-profit group based in California, which promotes the use of mobile phones to improve developing countries’ ability to respond to disasters. Launched with seed money from Google’s philanthropic arm and the Rockefeller Foundation in late 2007, it has just released a suite of open-source software to share, aggregate and analyse data from mobile phones. Its first test-bed is Cambodia, where health-workers can send text messages, containing observations and diagnoses, to a central number.

The sender’s location is determined for each of the messages, which pop up as conversation threads on an interactive map that can be called up on the web. Clicking on this map allows text messages to be sent back to users in the field from the control centre. InSTEDD says this service, called GeoChat, enables “geospatial ground-truthing, as your mobile team works to confirm, refute, or update data”.

Read more »

This event (pdf brochure available here) is taking place in India. Parvez Iftikhar, CEO Of Universal Services Fund of Pakistan is speaking about the progress of USF in Pakistan. I hope the  proceeding summaries (or better yet details) will be posted as it should be interesting for many.

The topics covered in this conference include:

• How can governments best support the creation of self-sustaining rural connectivity initiatives that benefit local people?
• Step-by-step practical guidance on overcoming the most pressing technical challenges
• Developing a world-class telecentre rural development programme
• Progress on delivering the promise of the United Services Obligation Fund
• Realising the benefits of greater rural connectivity though the delivery of E-services
• Mapping the future need for connectivity: Identifying choke points in the delivery network
• Training and empowering rural populations to make full use of the potential inherent in greater connectivity

Cellphone operators have finally decided to approach the finance ministry to seek withdrawal of the recently imposed 20 paisa tax per SMS, which will hinder growth of the industry.

It is learnt that cellular phone operators have started evolving a strategy and are preparing to make a presentation to the finance ministry in this regard. Before going to the ministry, top officials of cellular phone companies will separately meet with each other in a couple of days to make their case strong. Officers of one of the operators are also considering to approach the Competition Commission, as, according to them, the government has offered extra support to one of the companies at the cost of the whole industry.

The government, in the federal budget for 2009-10, has levied 20 paisa tax per SMS, which is in addition to the rate specified for the telecommunication sector. At present, all mobile phone companies except one are offering bulk SMS packages, which are seen greatly favourable for consumers. However, the new levy will reduce revenues of operators, and rates charging process will also become complex as most of the operators are offering unlimited SMS at a fixed rate.

According to data collected from the industry, out of 90 million registered cellular phone customers, over 45 million use the SMS service, each sending an average of seven SMS daily. Daily SMS traffic in the country is estimated at around 315 million and monthly traffic at around one billion.

The Pakistani market is very responsive to SMS-based packages. There has been tremendous growth in SMS usage, estimated at 30 per cent in recent years.

[via business recorder]

We are already late as 3G has been introduced in the rest of the world, including a few of our neighbours including India. How can we look forward to 3G services in Pakistan when the basic data service “SMS” is being taxed more than its cost? Government should have discussed such a decision with PTA before announcing it in the Budget 2009. PTA should take a strong stand on this motion as this will hinder growth in the Telecom industry of Pakistan.

It was a total surprise for me when I came to know that as per PTA (Pakistan Telecommunication Authority) Act (laws and regulations) voice traffic over bandwidth of ISP’s and DSL operators is illegal. This Public Information Bulletin of PTA confirms it. The information bulletin also terms such voice traffic as “grey traffic”, traffic which is illegal.

So, in the recent meeting on the issue of Grey Traffic held at PTA Headquarters, PTA has directed all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to ensure that their networks are not used for illegal call/voice termination and such cases of grey telephony are brought into the notice of PTA immediately.

Does this mean NO Voice Chat on Broadband ? No Skype?. I think PTA should reconsider on this move and make necessary amendments in its Act to facilitate services for home users.

Like I had mentioned in my previous post, the Nokia Bloggers Meet-up was held on 22nd May at The Sports Bar - Karachi. The event wasn’t just a bloggers meet-up but also a sneak-peak of N97.

N97- The new entrant in the Nokia’s flagship N-series is due to launch in Pakistan in first week of June. This time Nokia came different and thus was this pre-launch meet-up with the bloggers.

Mr. Adeel Hashmi, Communication Manager - Nokia Pakistan, started off the event giving an introduction to the idea of meeting the bloggers for the pre-launch and promised more of such meet-ups. The keynote speakers of the evening were Mr. Khurram Pradhan, Product and Portfolio Manager and Ms. Shabana Shahzad, Program Manager.

Khurram Pradhan gave his presentation on the main theme of N97 - Personal Internet. In his presentation he also focused on what’s driving the transformation of converged devices. He discussed that Nokia has been working on converging mobile phone with internet from last decade to enhance the personal internet experience.

At present out of the 1.3 billion internet users 520 million use it on mobile device and research has indicated this figure will go up to 1.5 billion by the year 2012. Nokia being consumer centric is on the move to make the mobile broadband dream a reality.

Not only this Nokia also plans to attract the market where we have 93 million users using the social network services like facebook, my space and twitter on their mobile devices, 82 million downloading maps on their devices, 22.3 million access the internet on devices daily for news and information and where we also have 184 million blogs among which 77%  are actively read and commented. In efforts of enriching the networking experience, the N97 comes with third party widgets, which are standalone programs on your mobile home screen.

Nokia’s customer care is a two dimensional strategy, one, devices for connecting people and second devices for connecting places which it achieves along with Ovi Maps.

Foreseeing the future in application development Nokia has acquired all of the rights to the Symbian operating system (OS) and open sourced it under the Eclipse license.

Khurram’s part ended with a Q and A session and then came the most interesting and most awaited SNEAK PEAK at the N97. Ms. Shabana Shahzad conducted it. Bloggers were also given the feel-it experience of N97.

Some of the N97 features are:

- Easy and fast connections to internet services
- Easy text input with QWERTY keyboard and touch screen
- 3.5 inch sliding tilt display
- Live personalized home screen with widgets
- Up-to-date information via RSS feed
- Fully compatible with Oviservices
- Browse real web pages
- Take pictures and videos and share them immediately
- Watch high-quality video on the large 3.5 inch 16:9 widescreen
- Video playback at 30 fps, for a wide array of formats
- Play videos, music and pictures on TV using TV-out
- Access internet video feeds through Nokia Video Center
- Enjoy great audio through standard 3.5 mm jack headphones, built-in stereo speakers or Bluetooth technology
- Digital music player with support for play list editing, equalizer and categorized access to your music collection
- Search, browse and purchase songs online in Nokia Music Store (for availability, please visit www.music.nokia.com)
- Nokia Maps with integrated compass and A-GPS receiver
- Multimedia city guides and navigation services. Drive: voice guided car navigation, or Walk: pedestrian-optimized turn-by-turn guidance. (Navigation may need to be purchased separately.)
- World-class game titles with N-Gage
- Make you home-screen private any time you want

N97 Tech Profile:

System:        WCDMA 900/1900/2100 (HSDPA), EGSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
User Interface:    S60 5th Edition
Dimensions:    117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm*mm (L x W x H) *18.25 mm at camera area
Weight:        Approx. 150 g
Display:        3.5 inch TFT with up to 16 million colorsnHD16:9 widescreen (640×360 pixels)
Battery:         Nokia Battery BP-4L, 1500 mAh
Memory:        Up to 48GB (32 GB on-board memory, plus 16GB expansion via micro SD memory card slot)
Video playback:    MPEG-4 / SP and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264,up to 30 fps, up to VGA resolution Real Video up to QCIF @ 30 fps Windows Media (WMV9) up to CIF @ 30 fps Flash Lite 3.0 / Flash Video in internet browser
Music playback:    MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, WMA
Lens:        Carl Zeiss Tessar™
Image capture:    Up to 5 mega pixels (2584 x 1938) JPEG/EXIF (16.7 million/24-bit color)
Video capture:    MPEG-4 VGA (640 x 480) at up to 30 fps
Aperture:        F2.8
Focal length:    5.4 mm
Flash:        Dual LED camera flash and video light
Talk time:        Up to 320 min (3G), 400 min (GSM)
Standby time:    Up to 400 hrs (3G), 430 hrs (GSM)
Video playback:    Up to 4,5 hours (offline mode)
Music playback:    Up to 37 hours (offline mode)

The device shall be availabe here in second week of june at an expected retail price of Rs. 60,000.

In the first funding of its type, Universal Service Fund of Pakistan (USF) provided contracts worth Rs. 1.4 Billion in total, for providing Broadband Services in the un-served urban areas of Faisalabad Telecom Region (FTR). PTCL and Wateen Telecom won this round of contracts: PTCL will provide 72,500 broadband connections and Wateen Telecom will provide 16,500 connections. The  Faisalabad telecom region comprises of districts of Faisalabad, Jhang, Sargodha, Toba Tek Singh, Khushab, Bhakkar and Mianwali, excluding the served city of Faisalabad.

Readers of this blog may recall the earlier posts that we did to highlight and appreciate the work by USF and its leadership. Universal Service Fund (USF) is made up of contributions by telecom service providers of Pakistan. In the last decade, Pakistan has made impressive progress in providing voice telephony services crossing 60% tele-density, but broadband proliferation in the country is still very low and there are less than 300,000 broadband connections in the country. Furthermore, almost all these connections are concentrated in around 15 big cities of the country. Universal Service Fund (USF) is working to bridge that gap.

USF has ambitious and comprehensive plans to improve lives through broadband and connectivity. Read more information from the USF press release:

CEO of USF, Parvez Iftikhar, informed that FTR, has 56 towns and cities of various sizes with numerous potential broadband users like, hospitals, distance learning centers of Open University, Banks, NADRA centers/kiosks, Government Offices, Libraries, Courts, Industries and various other institutions, in addition to a population of more than 3 Million that could benefit. He further informed that a major highlight of this project will be the establishment of more than 250 Educational Broadband Centres in all the High-Schools and Colleges in these towns and cities, besides more than 100 Community Broadband Centres will be set up which will provide Broadband to those who cannot afford their own computers. He acknowledged the tremendous cooperation, help and support of the Ministry of IT and PTA, without which this landmark could not be achieved.

CEO USF also informed that bids for the next three similar projects have already been called through Press and Websites for the areas around Multan, Hyderabad and Mansehra. These will be followed by more projects till the whole country is covered. Moreover, bids for three more Projects of Basic Rural Telecom and two of Optic Fiber expansion in Baluchistan are also awaited.

Blogs are abuzz about the $70 million investment by Nokia in a mobile-phone-payment system called Obopay. A good article in Technology Review magazine sums the current trend of investment in mobile payment infrastructure. This will become the key to how first-time users of electronic commerce enter the global marketplace.

The investment by Nokia suggests that, even in a plunging global economy, mobile financial services are guaranteed to grow in many of the world’s poorest nations.

In these parts of the world, many people lack access to traditional bank accounts and other financial services, but own mobile phones. Leveraging those phones as a way for people to access bank accounts, pay bills, borrow money, and pay loans is “a market that is exploding,” says Carol Realini, Obopay’s CEO. Realini believes that mobile-phone technology will affect financial services in a number of ways. “It will allow transactions in checks and cash to be done electronically,” she says. “That is the source of the opportunity that is unfolding around the world.”

But Realini hinted at a huge scale-up in the global availability of mobile-payment services, especially given that about 1.3 billion Nokia phones are in circulation. “It really is about serving the globe,” she says. “[Nokia] makes around 1.2 million phones every day–we can add our capabilities to their distribution.” A Nokia spokesperson says that the company could not comment on the investment because it is in a quiet period ahead of an earnings announcement.

Obopay, based in Redwood City, CA, operates in the United States and India and is one of a handful of services that lets people transfer money to one another between bank accounts using a cell-phone software application or a text message. (Users can also do so via the Web, mobile or otherwise.) In the United States, Obopay charges a fee to users sending money (25 cents to send any amount up to $1,000). In India, fees for banking services are paid by banks, which have willingly done so because the service allows them to cultivate new account holders without having to build new retail branches. Obopay does not disclose its total number of customers in either country.

After years of pricey bandwidth in Pakistan, things have taken a turn for better. Link Dot Net (LDN) has decided to increase its DSL speed to match the PTCL offer discussed here. This was a swift response, which leads me to think that LDN was perhaps prepared for this and was waiting for PTCL to make a move first. After all, LDN uses the same infrastructure as PTCL. This is great news for the consumers in Pakistan. The only thing we have to watch out is that the quality does not degrade with this.

2008 was the year when a number of business and technology trends converged and gave way to more bandwidth, available at more places and for relatively cheaper costs. This includes EDGE based on USB modems, WiMAX in selected cities and the expansion of DSL, cable and fiber based broadband.

As PTCL continued its broadband expansion, it has also helped start a price war. Because of its scale, power and reach, every time PTCL comes up with a promotion or rate reduction, the entire industry feels the ripple effect and either matches it or is forced to offer something else. There is some talk of a closer consolidation of Mobilink Infinity and Link Dot Net so that they are better able to compete with PTCL.

Netbooks - low-cost laptop like devices with small hard disk - are one of the most popular item these days with millions sold in the last few months. Their popularity is for a good reason. Why buy an expensive laptop when a $300 mobile internet device can do most of the work? This is not so good for PC makers but a good trend for consumers, especially in developing economies such as Pakistan and for students and casual home users.

A typical netbook has a 7 inch screen, an Intel Atom or Via Nano processor, a solid state (flash) hard drive and a keyboard that’s 80-85% standard size. Most have Wifi and will work with the usb edge which is common in Pakistan. GPS is also available in some models. It makes sense for those people who use a computer for e-mail, surfing the web and for using online applications  (google apps, social networking, media, blogs). Much of the data these days is stored online and all you need is to point to it, so large hard drives are not always needed. Also the trend of offline applications (gmail, calendar etc) is catching on - thereby giving you some flexibility when network is not available. When you are travelling the small size and light weight of a netbook is another useful aspect. However if are a power user, the small keyboard and display will be a strain. I think a netbook best suits a price-sensitive user who uses it for a few hours a day - and I know many such users.

Wired has an interesting article on the evolution of netbooks - that is how one laptop per child project paved the way for netbooks.  Some people have doubts about the usefulness of netbooks and their “low power” but I think the cost and feature tradeoff is in favor of those who understand their usage pattern and preferences.

In discussion on PTCL Environmental Friendly Billing System many comments were not in favour of the green bill not just that it was also not accepted among the general consumers. In this regard PTA has stepped in to facilitate the consumers and have advised PTCL to start reissuing itemized bills.

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has resolved the issue of non-itemized bills of PTCL and has advised PTCL to issue itemized bills from this month.PTCL has started sending monthly bills to its subscribers without itemized details appearing on the bills from the previous month.

PTA convened a meeting on this issue. During the meeting, the Authority observed that this decision was taken unilaterally and without adequate logistic support for meeting consumer demands for itemized bills. The Authority asked PTCL to continue with provisioning of itemized bills to its subscribers. PTA has taken this decision in the interest of consumers and the telecom industry.

The consumer frustration could have be addressed with itemized bills on PTCL website, but then again how many consumers use internet to access it. if we wish to go paperless, we need to increase awareness on internet and broadband not only in urban areas but also in rural areas.

Business Week has a story about the new mobile net and the wave of privacy invasion about to happen. Part of it starts from Facebook going on smart phones and the popularity of location based services will make it worse. Even though many users may not know or care, a lot of information is being collected about you and your behavior. Excerpts from the story below. I think that very soon there will be a backlash against all this invasion of privacy and lawsuits will erupt.

Imagine that your business had a complete log of your customers’ wanderings—every trip to the grocery store, every work commute, every walk with the dog. What could you learn about them? Armed with that knowledge, what sorts of goods and services might you try to sell them? Just as important, if you made your best pitch—relevant and timely, of course—would customers concerned about privacy tell you to get lost? This isn’t science fiction. A nascent industry extending from the laboratories of Google (GOOG) and Nokia (NOK) to a host of data-fueled startups is wrestling with these very questions.

The privacy implications are considerable. Is it O.K. for a boss to hand an employee a Latitude-loaded BlackBerry and then monitor her whereabouts? Companies that operate fleets of trucks have tracked employees for years. But similar technology in cell phones would potentially let all sorts of companies monitor and measure employee movements. Latitude does offer cloaking options. A user can hide from certain people or ask to be located by city, not by street.

Resistance to mobile ads is showing signs of breaking down, at least in some quarters. When surveys ask users if they’re interested in receiving the ads, nearly everyone says no, says Greg Sterling, a senior analyst at Opus Research. But when asked recently whether they would welcome messages only from local businesses they select, 43% say they’d be “very or somewhat interested.” That number, says Sterling, is higher among the data hounds who use the iPhone, BlackBerry, and other high-end phones.

Last week Warid Prepaid customers received the following message:

“Dear Customer, You can check your account balance free fo cost by dialing *100#. End of call notification service will not be available from 9th March 2009.”

This could be a move to reduce load on SMS servers. Lets see how the customers react to this as Warid was the network which introduced Call Charges Summary for prepaid customers in Pakistan.