State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Mobilink Infinity has announced that they will no longer offer 256Kbps package. It means that you have to use the upgraded package and pay more. It is great for those who were looking to upgrade but not good for those who are not interested in paying more. The official announcement is below. Somehow the message is not very clear and some people may be surprised to see the extra charge after a couple of months. This is related to our rants about clear messages and billing issues.

We are excited to inform that your 256Kbps Mobilink Infinity Wi MAX account has been upgraded to 512Kbps under a special promotion!!

The Data allowance will be the same as of your 256Kbps package, but with double the speed and performance. You can experience blazing fast browsing, downloads and streaming with this upgrade and enjoy it at *Absolutely No Additional Cost for the Next Two Months*.

This promotion will give you a free speed upgrade for initial two months however, you will have to pay the 512Kbps package monthly charges according to the tariff from the third month onwards.

Here are the tariff details.

The success of iPhone has not only changed the way phone companies and handset makers operate but also impacted other media channels. For instance, companies are now racing to build marketplaces for TV programs that act much like iPhone apps, able to interact with social-networking services, play games, call up movies and other Web content—all using a remote control, rather than a computer equipped with browsers. With PTCL and Wateen in the smart TV game, its only a matter of time before we see more of this.

I previously wrote about some initial steps that Verizon took. with social apps as widgets. Yahoo was also an early contender with a technology for TV applications it calls widgets. The TV applications are designed to exploit new consumer electronics devices with Internet connections that are beginning to appear in homes in significant numbers. More from this article:

Vudu, a startup that offers a streaming movie service; DivX, known for a popular format for storing digital movies; Boxee Inc., which offers software that lets users view Internet content on TVs; Roku, which sells a set-top box for receiving Internet content; and Syabas Technology, which announced a set-top box at CES.

Read more »

Transfers of large amounts of data across the Internet to wireless devices suffer from a major problem: The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) used to send and receive that data can be unnecessarily slow. Aspera, a new company, has now announced an alternative protocol designed to accelerate wireless transfer speeds. Called fasp-AIR, it includes new proprietary approaches to addressing problems of data transfer that are unique to wireless communications.

This story appeared at Technology Review.

Read more »

Easypaisa gets ISO/IEC 27001:2005 certification for Information Security Management System (ISMS) for mobile banking services. The PR received from Telenor Pakistan give the details.

Read more »

Jazz News Watch is an interesting way of providing news clips to Mobilink customer’s phones.  Jazz News Watch is a MMS based news alert service where subscribers of this service receive headline news clips from their subscribed TV channel every 4 hours as seen on the TV screen. So you get one MMS for every channel that you subscribe to – you will pay for all these MMS at Rs. 6 + tax per message. Jazz News Watch is a subscription based service and users can subscribe to this service against a fixed monthly fee.

This is one of the examples of providing fresh content via data services which can help uplift the ARPU for telecom companies.

Compatible with most MMS enabled handsets, Jazz News Watch is available for both Indigo & Jazz subscribers. Currently, Jazz News Watch is offering three news channels for subscription i.e. EXPRESS 24/7, EXPRESS NEWS, and SAMAA TV and more channels are yet to come. Monthly subscription for each news channel is Rs. 30 +Tax.

Telecommunications provider Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (www.ptcl.com.pk) announced on Thursday it has opened the largest data center in Karachi, Pakistan.

The data center is designed to be consistent with international standards and data center certification bodies.

The facility is protected from intrusion and failure with multi-layered security, fail-safe redundancy, diversity measures, and rapid response recovery measures, says the company. See video below.

Read more »

We have talked about netbooks and how the drop in price of these devices will impact computing, mobility and the need for mobile data consumption over wireless networks. The trend for smaller, cheaper Internet based devices continues full speed. See the graphic below (via WSJ) compares current netbooks to “smartbooks”, the next generation of ultra mobile netbooks.

PTA has recently published a long overdue paper outlining the key performance indicators (KPIs) for fixed broadband services in Pakistan. The objective of defining these indicators, per PTA paper, is to create transparent, quantifiable and measurable standard service parameters for broadband which the service provider is entailed to provide and the user has a right to expect.

Read more »

WaridTel Pakistan which is doing great with its prepaid brand ‘Glow’ and Prepaid GPRS bucket and is the favorite among users who voted in the poll being conducted here at telecompk, but faces criticism on lack of marketing its VAS. Recently it has come up with another unique VAS of ‘IM over SMS’. Unique because this one doesn’t need GPRS to get on IM.

Read more »

Here are the key points, taken from Morgan Stanley Mobile Internet report of Dec 15, 2009.

The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.

Read more »

Just recently Zong has come up with an application based e-mail service “Zong M@il“. The service enables Zong customers to access all their e-mail accounts on their mobile phone through an application client. Customers interested in staying connected to their email accounts can do it through Zong mail without necessarily having to buy high-end mobile handsets.

Read more »

We use Internet all the time, but the majority know not much about the history of it. While browsing YouTube, I got a chance to see the “History Of The Internet” in this animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.

Read more »