State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

We have covered the positive role played by telecom industry to help genuine causes of the social and civil society. The land slide which occurred in a remote area of Hunza recently caused damage and the lcoation of the incident made it difficult to provide relief and rescue effort through normal land. Telenor stepped in quick and contributed Rs. 2 million in an effort to augment government’s efforts for those impacted by  land-sliding in Attabad, Hunza. Telenor Pakistan’s Chief Strategy Officer & VP Corporate Affairs, Aamir Ibrahim presented the cheque to the Federal Minister for Information & Broadcasting and Governor of Gilgit-Baltistan, Qamar Zaman Kaira.

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Pakistan and China signed memorandum of understanding to cooperate on a number of technology and industry initiatives. One of the MoU is on Global Open Trunking Architecture (Gota) for Emergency Communication and Disaster Control management in Pakistan between Ministry of IT and Telecom (National Telecommunication Corporation) and ZTE Corporation People’s Republic of China.

Wikipedia defines Global Open Trunking Architecture as:

In telephony, GoTa or “Global Open Trunking Architecture” is a CDMA-based digital trunking system. The GoTA system was developed by ZTE, a Chinese manufacturer. The GoTA system can be used for both private and public trunking network applications.

GoTa is capable of providing a variety of trunking services:

* One-to-one private calls and one-to-many group calls
* The ability to set the user’s priority
* The ability to perform forced insertion/forced release based on the user’s priority
* The ability to provide special services such as system paging, group paging, sub-group paging, and dedicated Push-To-Talk services as required
* The ability to classify the groups into permanent and temporary groups, in which the group members can be managed by the user.

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”.

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Telecom sector has been doing its part to help out with the current humanitarian crisis in Pakistan. If you are abroad, you can contribute online in many ways. I made a contribution via Chipin at Pakistaniat. I recommend you to do the same, it can be any amount, but please do your part.

As another example Ufone employees also gave one day’s pay to help out. Also see this related discussion about helping out via SMS at TGP.

Since yesterday’s undersea telecom cable damage, calling Pakistan has become difficult. According to a statement issued by Transworld, this simultaneous failure of multiple undersea cables (SMW-3 & SMW-4) will impact Internet & Voice traffic for 8-10 days. The thrid submarine cable coming into Pakistan is TW1 and it is working fine but under more than usual load. India has a worse outage and a number of countries in the Middle East are impacted as well.

Multiple faults have simultaneously occurred in the three major international undersea cables that connect Pakistan to westward destinations (Europe and USA). This is affecting internet and voice traffic going in and out of Pakistan. Repair is underway but the nature of the fault is such that
it will likely take 8-10 days before all traffic is fully restored. This is affecting all westward traffic as both of Pakistan’s undersea cable operators, Transworld and PTCL rely on these transcontinental international
cable networks.

The triple fault has resulted in the availability of 40% of normal international capacities but we hope to lesson this gap significantly by immediate purchase of more eastward capacities from our international
partners to mitigate this situation. Our engineering team is in touch with the repair team and is monitoring the repair closely.

“The simultaneous failure of three major undersea cables at the same time is a very unusual and rare event”, said Kamran Malik, President of Transworld Associates, “our sales team is in communication with all our customers and we are aggressively taking all possible steps to ease the impact of this
difficult situation on our customers.”

Chanuka Wattegama writes about his presentations to World Bank about disaster risk management and the role played by information and communication technology. Via LirneAsia Site.

“We must realize the fact that disasters threaten sustained economic growth of the society and the country.”

These were the words of Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani addressing the opening ceremony of the first National Disaster Risk Management Conference. The function, reported Associated Press of Pakistan, was organized to mark the Disaster Awareness Day observed annually after the catastrophic earthquake which struck country’s northern areas in October 2005, killing 73,000 people and leaving 3.5 million homeless.

More or less the same sentiments but in a more action oriented manner were expressed at Washington DC at the two day workshop on ‘Disaster Risk Management in the Information Age on Oct 8-9.

I made two presentations. The first one, the opening remarks, was more a panoramic view how ICTs can be used in different phases of disaster management, while the second one focused on two projects, Sahana by Lanka Software foundation and our own Haz-Info – a pilot for a Community based Early Warning System.

More details with presentation slides of all speakers are available here.

 This picture is just another reminder before October ends that we still need to remember and support the victims of Earthquake. Here’s one easy way to do that.

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

Picture from The Economist. Read the accompanying story and see this related post.

“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.”

A crumpled note, delivered to a passing rock star-turned-philanthropist? No, Mr Sokor is a much sharper communicator than that. He texted this appeal from his own mobile phone to the mobiles of two United Nations officials, in London and Nairobi. He got the numbers by surfing at an internet café at the north Kenyan camp.

As Mr Sokor’s bemused London recipient points out, two worlds were colliding. The age-old scourge of famine in the Horn of Africa had found a 21st-century response; and a familiar flow of authority, from rich donor to grateful recipient, had been reversed. It was also a sign that technology need not create a “digital divide”: it can work wonders in some of the world’s remotest, most wretched places.

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Another post in the Disaster management technologies series. Japanese mobile telephone users may soon be warned of an earthquake in their area just before it strikes. Japan’s two biggest operators, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI have announced that they are jointly developing a system to notify customers of an imminent earthquake. Now the first question I have is: What good will it do? What will YOU do if you find out that a big earthquake is coming in 5 seconds?

And the second question is: How will this work? 

The system will pass on information from the Japanese meteorological agency which has developed a way of detecting earthquakes several seconds before the main tremor strikes.

The companies did not say which type of messaging they would use but acknowledged that email — a common way of communicating via cellphone in Japan — would risk overwhelming their mobile networks. SMS is less common in Japan but it is a likely candidate for this kind of alert, I think.

The meteorological agency’s early-warning system detects the first underground tremors that come before the main quake and estimates their intensity before big seismic waves reach the surface.

Japan, which endures 20 percent of the world’s major tremors, prides itself on having one of the world’s most accurate systems for assessing earthquakes and predicting tsunamis.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news99728548.html 

This post is a continuation of the Disaster management technologies series. The idea here is to present not just the commercial side of technology but also to showcase technical activities which can help save lives. This story is from Daily Yomiuri, a Japanese newspaper and it reports about plans to launch a satellite to create an emergency cell phone relay station in space by 2015. This is to solve 2 common issues (which Pakistan also faced in 2005) that after a disaster cell phones may be rendered useless due to damage to the local base station and due to the heavy call volume after the disaster which overloads remaining base stations.

The paper mentions how this effort will help:

Setting up a base station in space would ensure calls for help reach the relevant authorities in time, allow people to confirm loved ones’ safety without clogging regular mobile networks and relay calls to and from places that have lost connections.

The stationary orbital satellite with an antenna more than twice the size of any existing satellite antenna, would be used to secure mobile phone connections when ground base relay stations have been knocked out in an earthquake or other natural disasters.

Cell phones that use communications satellites are already in use, but the large size of the equipment for sending and receiving signals restricts it to users with special handsets.

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The earthquake of this week damaged the telecom and internet infrastructure, impacting many Asian countries. Banking services were severely hampered Wednesday but services had resumed Thursday after networks were reconfigured to detour around the broken cables. In June 2005 Pakistan’s only undersea fiber-optic cable link with the outside world at that time developed a serious fault, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, for 11 days. See my previous post on Pakistan’s new undersea project.

This earthquake underscored the vulnerabilities of a system where huge amounts of data speed through the region in cables laid deep beneath the sea, noted Red Herring magazine.

The WALL STREET JOURNAL (12/29) reports that the slow but steady return of telecom services across Asia, after Tuesday’s earthquake damaged a critical nexus of cables off Taiwan, suggests that ‘workaround’ tactics and the quake’s holiday timing may limit its impact on business. Some telecom companies were working to reroute their service by other channels, including through Australia, the Indian Ocean or by satellite. Several ships were on their way Thursday to repair regional telecom cables broken by an earthquake off southern Taiwan, but officials warned that it could take several more days before Internet access across much of Asia returned to normal. One of the two cables that were broken is owned by a consortium that includes Singapore Telecom, France Telecom and Pakistan Telecommunication. The other is partly owned by China Unicom, StarHub and Telekom Malaysia.

An article in today’s BUSINESSWORLD (Philippines) reports that industry observers said that the chaos in Asia’s Internet service sparked by an undersea earthquake shows that the region’s cable network is too fragile and overly reliant on connections to the U.S. Undersea fiber-optic cables account for more than 95 percent of international telecommunications thanks to their strength, capacity and connection quality, according to South Korean provider KT Submarine Corp. These cables have been around for over 125 years. According to a report by policy think tank Rand Corporation the cables, which for the most part lie unprotected on the ocean floor can be dmanaged by ship anchors, fish nets that scrape the sea bottom and even in one case, sharks that gnawed on a line apparently due to its electromagnetic pulse.

One alternative would be satellites, which are costlier and do not provide as much capacity or quality of transmission as fiber-optic cables, analysts said. See my post to read more about use of satellite commuication for disaster management.

The Red Herring article notes that South Korea has 10 main undersea cables connecting it to the world and seven of them were damaged by the quake. India was highly vulnerable from damage to undersea cable links as well because it receives 80 percent to 90 percent of its bandwidth from the undersea network, industry officials said.

This incident has forced the global telecommunication industry to seriously consider resilience and business continuity. The world of today depends too much on communication technology to allow this to happen again. I expect to see many improvements in the coming months and years.