I leave it up to you to comment on the achievements mentioned above. I think the previous posts and comments on rising price were clear enough that consumers are not satisfied with the recent direction of telecom sector in Pakistan.
Over the years I have presented different views and ideas on how to improve the very low number of broadband users in Pakistan (here and here). Here’s another view by Dr Amir Mateen (Cisco) from TeleCON 2008. His presentation looks at the problem in a different way and provides some brutal, honest analysis such as “Not digital divide, just the old divide carried over into the digital world”. His recommendation: Redefine success criteria for broadband in Pakistan.
Tee Emm attended the event and shared some great commentary on Dr. Mateeen’s presentation which is worth repeating here:
Some presentations were really good and thought provoking like the one given by Dr Amir Mateen of Cisco Systems Pakistan where he talked about how great the broadband vacuum is in Pakistan and how unprepared the local contents are and that in the absence of structured local contents, people will make up their own contents (read social networks) and in doing so, there is a real danger of a whole new generation getting carried away in the roman Urdu flood and how this threatens the Urdu script and the associated heritage.
I share the same concerns about how we are treating Urdu language in Internet and telecommunication age. This is something which needs to be discussed in more detail.
Citizens of 
Pakistan have been a victim of Internet censorship many times in recent past. The last attempt by PTCL to block YouTube resulted in side effects for the whole cyberspace. Here’s a review of Access Denied a recent book on this topic. Review is by Bruce Schneier . The book is edited by Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski and Jonathan Zittrain. Thanks to Shahzad Ahmad for sharing this at Pakistan ICT Policy discussion group.
In 1993, Internet pioneer John Gilmore said “the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”, and we believed him. In 1996, cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow issued his ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, and online. He told governments: “You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement that we have true reason to fear.”
At the time, many shared Barlow’s sentiments. The Internet empowered people. It gave them access to information and couldn’t be stopped, blocked or filtered. Give someone access to the Internet, and they have access to everything. Governments that relied on censorship to control their citizens were doomed.
Today, things are very different. Internet censorship is flourishing. Organizations selectively block employees’ access to the Internet. At least 26 countries - mainly in the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the former Soviet Union - selectively block their citizens’ Internet access. Even more countries legislate to control what can and cannot be said, downloaded or linked to. “You have no sovereignty where we gather,” said Barlow. Oh yes we do, the governments of the world have replied.
Access Denied is a survey of the practice of Internet filtering, and a sourcebook of details about the countries that engage in the practice. It is written by researchers of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI; http://www.opennet. net), an organization that is dedicated to documenting global Internet filtering around the world.
The first half of the book comprises essays written by ONI researchers on the politics, practice, technology, legality and social effects of Internet filtering. There are three basic rationales for Internet censorship: politics and power; social norms, morals and religion; and security concerns.
Recently the newly launched Mobilink Foundationcame under discussion at Telecom Grid Pakistan. Some members of the group were skeptical of the foundation and thought of it as another marketing tactic. My view on this is optimistic - whats better? a successful company with a dedicated organization or the usual half-hearted efforts on social activities without focus?
Bottom line is that as long as some useful work gets done for the society I don’t mind the marketing advantage for the company … thats a side benefit, a bonus. I hope that the Mobilink Foundation succeeds at their stated aim and it is staffed by people who truly care about the future of children in Pakistan.
Our vision is free access to education for children and healthcare for all Pakistanis. We seek to promote a country in which all children go to school and people have access to healthcare, irrespective of their financial strength and background. We aim to bring about sustainable improvements to the living standards of the underprivileged by working with local communities and relevant organizations within Pakistan.
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.
Spotted this interesting article at LIRNEAsia.net. Nathan Eagle, who is developing a voice interface for the mobile internet, writes about the challenges of making mobile web useful for developing countries.
The Mobile Web is NOT helping the Developing World… and what we can do about it.
By Nathan Eagle | MobileActive.org
The phones that are designed and marketed for the ‘developing world’ today aren’t data enabled, they have no browser or any ability to function as a traditional data device. We’re dumping hundreds of millions of devices into these regions that are essentially crippled - and their legacy (the average life span of a phone in Africa is many times that of it’s Western counterpart) will affect mobile internet usage in these regions throughout the next decade. Furthermore, in the small Kenyan village where I live it’s significantly less than 1 in 10 phones that can support the traditional ‘mobile Web’ experience, and it’s probably closer to 1 in 1000 phones that have ever successfully connected to the web. Most of the phones I see in the village were originally manufactured well before 2003. (The most popular selling phone in my village is an old Ericsson that stopped being made back in 2001.) The local mobile operators should take some blame as well - many simply don’t have the equipment or expertise to role out a data network on top of their rapidly expanding GSM net. It took me over 10 days of phone calls with my local Kenyan operator to get my phone activated for their new EDGE network. Most people I know give up after the first couple of hours of configuration. And that’s assuming they actually have the right phone…
I have written about Universal Service Fund in Pakistan before. I stumbled upon its website through a banner ad about the broadband initiative by USF Pakistan. Details are in this Concept Paper (PDF, 816 KB) and in the graphic below. Unlike telephony work in the rural areas, the broadband focus by USF is on whole of Pakistan.
Soliciting feedback and comments is a sensible move (the deadline has passed already). Lets see if USF can act on that advice, overcome the hurdles to broadband in Pakistan and make a meaningful change!
Note that USF has been estalished as an entity (company) by Ministry of IT.
A few months ago I wrote about DRITTE and the interesting research work by Umar Saif and team at LUMS. One of their projects is Peer-to-Peer Dialup Networking which aims to mitigate the digital divide by creating efficiencies from dialup Internet. Also called poor man’s broadband, the concept is as illustrated below.
This work, funded by Microsoft Research’s Digital Inclusion Grant, was featured in New Scientist. Note that lack of cheap ‘local bandwidth’ in Pakistan is something which has been discussed actively on blogs and forums (here and here).
Here is the abstract of the paper:
In this paper we present a peer-to-peer dialup architecture for accelerated “Internet access” in the developing world. Our proposed architecture provides a mechanism for multiplexing the scarce and expensive international Internet bandwidth over higher bandwidth p2p dialup connections within a developing country. Our system combines a number of architectural components, such as incentive-driven p2p data transfer, intelligent connection interleaving and content-prefetching. This paper presents a detailed design, implementation and evaluation of our dialup p2p data transfer architecture inspired by Bittorrent.
For more information see this review at SIGCOMM site. You can also download the paper from there. The authors include Umar Saif, Ahsan Latif Chudhary, Shakeel Butt, and Nabeel Farooq Butt. Great job, congratulations to the team!
I will write more about their other interesting projects soon. Here’s an excerpt from New Scientist (subscription needed) article:
IT’S not often that you get to go faster by avoiding the superhighway, but soon students in Pakistan will be able to download big files faster by avoiding the internet.
Instead of using expensive broadband or slow, unreliable dial-up connections, students at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) will try out a new system, dubbed “poor man’s broadband” (PMB). It allows computers to link to each other directly for faster downloads, and it works as long as at least one computer running the trial software has already downloaded the desired file from the internet. The system should also reduce the university’s risk of overloading the bandwidth supplied by its internet service providers (ISPs).
Tee Emm’s post about th need for a local internet clearing within Pakistan is intersting and thought-provoking. According to Tee Emm, the local clearing should avoid (or minimize) expensive foreign exchange costing international links and should result in very affordable bandwidth rates - using the SKA (sender keeps all) or cheaper local bandwidth models.
A couple of questions around this idea come to mind: If the private sector has to do it alone then the business case for this should be well established - has anyone worked on this? or should it be a public-private sector partnership? In my opinion this ought to be part of PTA’s mandate. By the way I hope that the IT ministry and PTA realize that they desperately need to do something about broadband in Pakistan.
Tee Emm notes that in Karachi, the majority of the traffic between the 3 well-known ISPs ( Worldcall, Cybernet & Multinet) is exchanged outside Pakistan on Transworld, PIE and on IPLC towards KL in Malaysia. He mentions the following issues (see the full post) with the current situation.
Short Term Problems:
- Uniform (high) Internet prices across the industry
- Unnecessary 20% to 35% for-ex spending on Int’l circuits that could be sold to the right customer at a premium
- No cheap ‘local bandwidth’ available to users
- No incentive for ‘remaining local’ to users or content publishers
- Network outages beyond Pakistan result in network outages inside Pakistan
Long Term Problems:
- No impetus for establishing local data center for Internet hosting needs (excluding vertical DS such as Banking etc)
- As more of the country embraces Internet, ’short term problems’ identified above will get magnified.
- No mirrors of popular contents - even those willing to place their contents near the Pakistani Internet users are amazed at the absence of local IDCs.
- No real development of Urdu and other regional languages contents on the Internet.
Rabta is Urdu for making a connection. Here is the official Telenor press release about this. I am curious to find out more about the affordability of these centers and if these centers have the appropriate set of applications for the population in the remote areas.
“We want to establish an easy-to-access point for these communities to benefit from e-mail, scanning, faxing and printing facilities in their everyday lives. With information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) becoming an ever-increasing part of our lives, there is need for such facilities to be made available in Pakistan’s rural and semi-rural areas too”, said Sigvart Voss Eriksen, Chief Marketing Officer in Telenor Pakistan.
Digital Media Asia reports on this:
Telenor Pakistan recently launched Telenor Rabta Centres as part of a pilot project involving local communities. These community information centres offer all modern communication facilities under one roof. The services use Telenor Pakistan’s high-speed EDGE network.
Telenor Pakistan is collaborating with the GSMA Development Fund, Nokia Siemens Networks and the ILO (International Labour Organisation) on the project. Rabta Centres have been established in Quetta (Balochistan), Khuzdar (Balochistan), Bagh (Azad Kashmir), Jamal Deen Wali (Rahim Yar Khan, Punjab), Ahmadpur Sial (Jhang, Punjab) and 18 Hazari (Jhang, Punjab).
Each centre is equipped with two PCs with EDGE data card to connect to the internet, a printer, scanner, webcam and a handset with Telenor Pakistan connection.
The GSMA Development Fund is providing support in project management and facilitation activities for the pilot implementation. Telenor Pakistan and its project partners have selected entrepreneurs from the corresponding local communities to run these centres as their business. All entrepreneurs have been trained in computer and entrepreneurial skills.
One of the impacts of the earthquake of Oct 8 2005 was that the telecommunication infrastructure and services in the northern areas were updated. ERRA (Earthquake Reconstruction & Rehabilitation Authority) was formed and issued a vision and strategy for the telecom services in the area. The telecom strategy by ERRA, available online, gives a summary of the damage to telecom infrastructure in 2005 and the proposed approach to new work. By the way, the website has a wealth of information about the area, progress of the projects and statistics about many reconstructions sectors.
One of the important related development has been the change in policy regarding licencing of services as covered in this post by Tee Emm. Now all major operators are allowed to offer their services in the earthquake impacted areas. Telenor has been expanding its network to the Northern areas and has been doing extensive marketing about it as well. Earlier this year CMPak also signed on an agreement for providing services in AJK and Northern areas. Overall these changes provides better choices for the people which is their inherent consumer right and narrows down the digital divide a notch. It may not be much consolation for the people who lost so much 2 years ago but its part of the bigger struggle to provide them better services to keep going.
Related Link: October 8th 2005, Remembered
Much has been written about the way mobile phone service has changed life for the public in Pakistan and elsewhere in the developing world. This blog has covered the impact of mobile services on the Base of the Pyramid in this post. Continuing in the “Benefits” series, here are some of the intangible and productivity benefits listed in the Deloitte study. The study uses the ‘willingness to pay’ concept to quantify the value of intangible benefits.
I’m sure there are many other points which can be included but the ones above cover the major categories. Previously I had discussed the corporate social responsibility to which mobile companies have been a major contributor.
For something a bit more tangible there are the Mobilink sponsored water coolers, such as this one in Karachi (Thanks to Tee Emm for this picture). I’d like to hear other examples or stories from the readers about the benefits.
This blog was started by Babar Bhatti to share and analyse new and interesting developments in Pakistan Telecom industry. More ...
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