State of Telecom Industry 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.

• “productive usage” vs “# of connections”
• results vs usage of broadband internet (catch the mobility wave)
• Urdu on the web (in normal Urdu script)

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.

Continuing on the series of posts from TeleCON 2008, this one is on Profitability Challenges in a Low ARPU market. This presentation was made by Sajjad Hussain, Director Networks of Ericsson. It has some material which students and researchers will find particularly useful.

Naturally the presentation is tilted towards networks, transmission efficiencies, 3G and NGN. But most importantly it talks about the energy consumption and ways to address the energy demand by considering Green Sites which utilize alternative energy sources such as solar power and battery backup. There are a few slides on mobile commerce as well. Here is the full presentation in pdf. 

Related Posts:

• Challenges Of High Growth Mobile Telecom-Markets
• Will Average Revenues Per User In Pakistan Rise?

Guest Post From Umar Farooq

Telecom Infrastructure Sharing is an important concept in emerging telecommunication markets. Here’s an extract from a GSM World report

Commercial considerations, rather than regulatory mandates, appear to be driving the increasing trend for Mobile Operators to adopt a variety of infrastructure models. Examples of mobile network sharing can be found in both mature and developing markets, with 3G providing an added impetus to assess the commercial and regulatory viability of network sharing. Network sharing may take many forms, ranging from passive sharing of cell sites and masts to sharing of radio access networks (RANs) and other active elements such as network roaming and the core.

In Pakistan, this concept’s utilization has taken place. However, we still have to see an effective regulation from PTA on this one (Editor’s note: See this link on PTA website for consultation paper on Infrastructure sharing - the pdf is also available here). We have seen different operators having their towers erected on the same roof top and at times within feet from each other on ground. Why couldn’t they use the same tower to place their antennas and share the cost ?

Infrastructure sharing has been taking place where Telenor did strike a lease deal with Wateen Telecom to use their Fibre capacity for their core transmission ring. But here, Wateen established the Fibre to sell its capacity to telecom operators. Infrastructure of RAN or Core Transmission has still some grounds to cover, before telecom operators in Pakistan become mature enough to operate shared structures while reducing operations costs.

The element of operator maturity is key here, because infrastructure sharing, does reduce costs if it is operated efficiently. If not operated efficiently, additional operational costs plus the reduced QOS loss, makes it useless for an operator.

From an end-user’s point of view, you see less number of towers and operators competing on their services rather than coverage.

Telenor and Mobilink have started offering in-flight cell phone. These services are roaming with and come with a few conditions. For those who find long flights boring or unproductive this can be a great way to pass time and be productive. But there’s a down side to this. I’m sure you have been noticed what happens moments after when a plane lands? Most people ignore the requests from staff to stay seated and quiet. Instead they whip out their phones and start calling their friends and families.  Usually this gets over quickly as people are in a hurry to get out. Now extend this scenario to a long flight. Imagine a chatty person sitting close to you talking for hours during your flight. I tell you, it can be an absolute nightmare!

Here’s a bit of description from the companies about their service:

Mobilink
Partnering with Air France and Emirates through our partner networks OnAir and AeroMobile, Mobilink offers GSM network onboard aircraft; providing not only voice calls and text messages but also data over GPRS. Currently, this service is being provided on one Emirates and one Air France aircraft with plans to roll out across fleets and other airlines in future.

Telenor
Telenor Pakistan proudly launches In-flight mobile phone services onboard International flights collaborating with AeroMobile exclusively on Emirates Airline.

In the US this stirred up plenty of noise — Congress even considered passing a law to ban voice calls on the plane. Then FAA clarified that it was not going to allow cell phones aboard the planes in near future. It is clear that airlines want it and the phone companies want it too. However some powerful consumer groups (read politicians) loathe the idea of a noisy flight. It is the ultimate conflict between businesses and those who don’t like technology intrusion in every aspect of life.

In Pakistan it is less of an issue. People may not even think of it as an issue at this point. But it will be interesting to see the proliferation of cell phone use in Asia and Europe and how people react to it.

Throughout my recent stay in Malaysia, I tried to find GSM towers but did not find one and for me it was very strange. Finally I solved the mystery. In cities like Kuala Lumpur, Putrajaya, Cyberjaya, Petaling jaya etc, communication equipment was placed on all the high rise buildings and that is why it was not visible. However, between cities and in small towns, authorities have placed pre-fabricated towers made of synthetic fiber or plastic like material and good thing is that these communication towers look like trees and thus become invisible among other trees and plantation. I suppose, it is an eminent effort to keep landscape neat and to preserve the environment while deploying technology.

This is bad news for Pakistanis abroad: they will pay considerably more for calling Pakistan starting May 1. See the news item from Dawn. It seems to me that we are regressing in terms of policy making. Who benefits from this? PTA and long distance operators. What about consumers? Well, a lot of consumers and industry experts are upset and are taking various actions such as expressing their concerns through various offline and online channels (see this petition). One thing is certain: the grey telephony market will flourish because of this. Expect more noise around this in the coming days. I am not looking forward to my next bill for international calls!

Salman Ansari (former CEO of Paktel) has posted interesting predictions at various online forums. Here’s an excerpt:

Quality of calls of inbound calls specially from the US will become terrible (cellular terminations) as most inbound terminations will come in via low cost grey market – biggest culprits will be the biggest carriers (AT&T, Bell Canada, etc).

Wasim Baig summarized his views about this change at TGP:

Pros:
1. LDIs get a higher rate, higher margin
2. APC contribution increases
3. Origination increases
4. Balance of trade in PK’s favor

Cons:
1. Grey market increases
2. LDI may increase origination rates as well
3. Yet more regulation! PTA stays relevant to pricing ..
4. Market pricing takes a back seat

Here’s more from Dawn article.

“The PTA, in fact, has addressed the demand of local operators, who have been pleading for increase in such rates, as it would not affect the local consumers of the facility,” said the source. “But it would naturally increase the cost of calling to Pakistan from outside”.

Read more »

Here is a very interesting post about mobile video from Brough Turner, whose blog I close follow. Brough makes a very good point that mobile video on demand is what makes sense for most cases - not live TV. It also provides one more reason why mobile TV offering from Telenor did not take off (in addition to the fact that it was pricey).

I have an article, Going Mobile TV(pdf), that’s recently been published by MobileIN, a wireless and mobile information site. In it I basically argue that major investments in mobile TV broadcast capability are less likely to pay off than investments mobile video-on-demand.

The biggest trend in commercial television viewing is personal video recorders like TiVo. People want to watch TV content when they want, not when broadcasters schedule it. The only exception is major sports events (the Superbowl or World Cup matches). Even the evening news is frequently rescheduled for later in the evening.

The second relevant trend is growth in YouTube and similar web-based video content. Broadcast TV went from 2-3 channels in the 1950s to hundreds of channels on a typical cable system today. But consumers are also interested in the long tail of millions of videos that can only be served over the Internet today and, potentially, over the mobile Internet in the future.

Finally, survey’s of early adopters of mobile video show music videos, movie trailers, weather, sports action clips, comedy videos, cartoons and amateur video shorts – typically a few minutes long at most – are the most popular content. In addition, it appears 85 percent of mobile video viewers watched viral videos (content sent or pointed out by others) rather than content they found themselves.

All and all, mobile consumers are looking for video -on-demand, not pre-scheduled broadcast TV.

So what’s the logic for massive investments in spectrum, followed by even more money in new wireless infrastructure, followed by the need to sell everyone new handsets that can receive the new broadcast mobile TV channels?

The last post about 3G in Pakistan had Mobilink’s presentation. Now lets take a look at the views of equipment makers like Huawei, ZTE and Ericsson. Obviously all of them were optimistic about 3G and they talked about the benefits and the smooth transition to 3G  they can provide.

ZTE had a very well thought out set of slides. Here is how it was organized.

• WCDMA Worldwide Deployment
• WCDMA in Emerging Markets
• Advantages of WCDMA for Pakistan
• Economical 2G/3G Construction Solution

There was agreement that the key issue for WCDMA is handset pricing and infrastrucutre investment.

The recent BlackBerry security concerns raised by Indian Govt have been reported widely in press. To me it seems that governments around the world are struggling with controlling technology. Just a few weeks ago Pakistan made the headlines when PTCL inadvertently caused the youtube outage. Some wondered if the BlackBerry problems could spill over to Pakistan. I remember reading at TGP that security was the reason for the delay in introducing BB services in Pakistan … so hopefully we are past this obstacle.

Obviously the old-school bureaucracies have a hard time keeping up with the fast pace of technology. It seems that one fine day the Indian government realized that there’s a threat, reacted hastily and scared the market! To be fair, most government agencies tend to work in that mode.

Excerpt from WSJ:

Indian telecommunications operators are negotiating with the government on a framework for BlackBerry usage that will allow the Indian market to expand but also meet concerns for national security.

India’s government isn’t comfortable with the way information transmitted via BlackBerry is encrypted because it’s too complex to be monitored, according to one industry official. The fear is that information can’t be monitored and that this could be a security risk.

These worries had caused some to speculate that India’s government might opt to block BlackBerry messages. But India’s telecommunications secretary Siddhartha Behura downplayed the prospect, saying Friday that “there is no question of banning at this point,” according to Reuters. He said the government is talking to telecom operators and to BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion Ltd. of Canada.

PTA has announced a competition for Telecom/ CT professionals and students, asking them to write papers on the topic of “Connecting People With Disabilities, ICT Opportunities for All“. This is related to the World Telecom Day on May 17. First prize is Rs 25,000. See the details on how to enter by clicking on the image on the right.

I commend PTA on encouraging ICT folks to tackle this much needed problem. I hope that this will result in plenty of actionable ideas which are suitable for Pakistan’s conditions. I’ll be glad to help any students out there who want to compete.  Hurry, the deadline is March 31!

As if Pakistan needed one more issue, we have the botched YouTube blockage attempt which caused anger and frustration in Pakistan, plenty of confusion and some conflicting emotions, and possibly a YouTube outage. This BBC report alleges that YouTube went down for 2 hours because of the technical misunderstanding by PCCW, an Asian ISP. But the outage itself, if any, is less interesting to me. My take is that now that global media is paying attention to this lets use this opportunity to deal with this persistent Internet blcoking issue in Pakistan and turn things around. Enough has been written already so I will point out some of the items of interest here and invite you to share your thoughts.

I agree with my friend Tee Emm who wrote a post: The Tube Trouble and Why its a Good News

The persistent problem (of Internet censorship done the wrong way) is not being intermittently flashed to us any more - instead, this event throws it right into our faces.

That Internet censorship is bad and useless is an established fact but that it happens worldwide in both developing and developed worlds is even more established fact. In the absence of compelling Internet applications in Pakistan, Internet remains the sole killer application for the broadband mass uptake the government appears to be so concerned about.

Adil Najam has repeatedly written about the censorship and the flawed approach where government assumes the role of nation’s moral guardian role. Adil points to the possible political motivation for the ban at Pakistaniat.com:

The general opinion is that th ban is more “political” than “cultural”. A large number of videos with actual footages of electoral rigging were placed on YouTube and the view is that the “ban” or the “technical difficulties” that have come up are really a way to distract attention in Pakistan away from these videos, at least for the time being.

The ban may already be over but the repercussions will be there for a while. The technical angle to the Internet censorship and limitations of the Internet infrastructure in Pakistan is important as well. I am sure Google is looking into this as well. Since I don’t live in Pakistan and can’t experience it first hand I’ll refer back to Tee Emm’s post:

Now is the time stop using Cisco ACLs and use layer 4 solutions where the filtering must happen.

I believe this will force the PTA and the government (and the trigger happy PTCL’s PIE) to upgrade their infrastructures so that the delicate balance between civil liberties and our societal sensitivities is well kept.

Related Items:

• News.com on Pakistan’s role in YouTube utage
• Pakistan hijacks YouTube
• Telecom Grid Pakistan
• Technorati

PTA has asked for bids for consulting on three important topics (see below). which will have far reaching impact on Information and Communications Technology in Pakistan. Feb 25 is the deadline. some of the industry veterans had been asking for local Internet Exchange peering for a long time and it is good that finally there is some activity. PTA has taken the lead even though some of the topics are not limited to telecommunication. Regardless, if the right groups participate, this should benefit the IT industry in Pakistan as a whole. See complete information at this page on PTA website. Follow the links below for the details ((pdf documents) for each paper.

1. Local Internet Exchange Peering Points
2. Strategy for Public Data Warehouses
3. Digital Signature Infrastructure

This is the page on PTA site where all consultation papers are listed.