State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Ufone has come up with their version of talkMail, Awaz Email. Like talkMail, Awaz Email lets you record a voice message and send it directly to someone’s email. By calling the Awaz Email IVR 4412, you can just do that.
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After IM over SMS warid brings in SMS to PTCL V-Fone. Now all Warid customers can receive and send SMS to any V-PTCL number within Pakistan any day any time.

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Over the weekend I came across the Indigo’s latest TVC, and I must say it is one of the professional classic TVCs. But before that I would share an interesting comment on my last weeks post about the Jazz Sim Lagao offer.

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A lot of people tend to forget to take care of important things because of their busy schedules. Simple tools such as text message reminders can help with things like saving money on a regular basis.

A new study by a group of economists looking at why people save money found that simply sending out cellphone reminders increased savings balances by 6%.

The study challenges the idea that people don’t have enough self-control to save. Instead, the problem may be that they just aren’t paying attention, said Dartmouth University economics professor Jonathan Zinman, one of the study’s four authors.

“Savings isn’t at the top of their mind,” said Mr. Zinman. “Basically all we did was remind them.”

While a 6% increase may not send bank-account balances soaring, nudging up the savings rate has been historically difficult—until the latest recession.

Classroom financial education hasn’t proven particularly effective, said Jennifer Tescher, director of the Center for Financial Services Innovation. But online and cellphone platforms could deliver messages with greater impact.

“This is an idea we think has tremendous potential,” she said.

Via WSJ

Missed call alerts services have been around for a while. Warid has introduced this service as a subscription now. And its available for prepaid users for just Rs. 10 + tax per month. Compare this with Telenor’s missed call alert service where service activation is free of charge for the post paid customers (All Packages) whereas all prepaid customers would have to pay a one time charge of Rs.50 (plus tax). Here’s more from Warid.

Now whenever your phone is busy‚ switched off or out of coverage‚ you can rest assured that as soon as you are back in coverage‚ you will be instantly informed about all your missed calls via SMS. With Missed Call Alerts‚ you can enjoy complete peace of mind knowing that you can miss calls but never lose out on them!

Warid now also offers the MCA service to its Prepaid Users and gives free service activation for first month.

Key Features:
1. Available on both Warid Prepaid and Postpaid subscriber
2. Instant delivery of Missed Call Alerts upon subscriber availability
3. Alerts carry calling party’s name if number is saved in subscriber’s phone book
4. One alert per missed call‚ ensuring ease of returning calls
5. Permanent storage of Missed Call Alerts for future reference

To activate the service, type ‘MCA ON’ in a SMS and send it to 129.
Charges:
- Monthly subscription for Postpaid Users: Rs.30+tax
- Monthly subscription for Prepaid Users: Rs. 10+tax.

I have been writing about the need for quality international SMS for Pakistanis living abroad. There are plenty of free web sites but overall their quality of service and the user experience is not acceptable. The ideal solution is one which is available online, is reliable, not too expensive and has a good payment system. For most expat Pakistanis it is not a big deal to pay a few dollars a month to have this option available on demand.

Finally – Localphone has addressed this gap and offered an online service for sending international SMS. For 5 cents you can send a SMS to Pakistan using Localphone website. I tested the service by sending a few SMS from the Localphone website and it works great. Once you have contacts saved and funds added to your account, its quite easy and convenient. There is room for a number of improvements (sms archival, larger address book, sms to direct dial access numbers etc) but this is a good start.

One of the early complaints about iPhone have been the missing multimedia messaging (MMS) feature. It took about 2 years to roll MMS out and one of the reason is said that AT&T was not ready to support that level of network traffic. Apple had to provide the software to support MMS as well. Well, now that MMS has been officially released worldwide, what does it tell the usage of MMS and the traffic tell us?

One of the interesting thing is that MMS as a general feature has been slow to take off. We discussed it here. Now that iPhone has support for MMS, there is additional info about the reasons and the problems associated with MMS. Cost and interoperability are two major factors. With AT&T, the price for messaging is included in the SMS messaging plans so its not a big deal. Interoperability and reliability of sending/receiving messages remains a concern.

Personally, I have been facing issues with sending messages on AT&T network after the MMS roll out. Even plain SMS messages have been failing and that almost never happened before. Here’s a quote from Computer World.

In 2008, MMS made up just 2.5 percent of all messages sent from phones worldwide, meaning about 97.5 percent were SMS text messages, according to ABI Research. ABI expects the MMS share to grow to just 4.5 percent by 2014.

Given the amount of data that iPhone fans are already using on AT&T’s network for Web browsing, video, e-mail and social networking, it would take quite a popularity breakthrough for MMS to drag down the infrastructure through sheer traffic, analysts said. However, the carrier’s fears in one respect may have been justified, said ABI analyst Dan Shey.

Several factors have dampened the popularity of MMS, according to analysts and industry observers. A big one is that the messages still don’t always get through.

Related articles of interest:

• How could iPhone MMS crash AT&T’s network?
• MMS is live
• YouTube video on iPhone MMS

Well, among all the recent upgrade to iPhone software, my favorite remains cut and paste its nice to get multi media messaging – let’s see when it actually works!

InMobi is a fast growing global mobile advertisement network. InMobi has been a sponsor to Telecompk.net for a while and we had the chance to sit with InMobi CEO and ask a few questions about the future of mobile advertising and opportunities in this exciting space.

How is InMobi different from its competitors?
Instead of focusing on being different we’d much rather focus on doing things better. What has helped us grow to this point is our focus on solving real customer needs and our value proposition to our partners. InMobi has consistently focused on providing higher quality and monetization levels for our publishers and greater return-on-investment (ROI) for advertisers, many of whom are trying the mobile internet medium for the first time, or for the first time in our region.

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I thought it would be interesting to present information about secure SMS. What is it and why do you need it? There are times when higher grade of security and trust is needed from a sms-based communication. Examples include transmission of sensitive and confidential information from handset-to-handset, server-to-handset or vice versa. Usage scenarios range from financial transactions, healthcare and government and defense agencies. Most of the content here is via CellTrust website, a vendor of secure SMS solution.

Here are some of the potential problems with standard SMS.

• Standard SMS can be intercepted along the transmission path at multiple locations (aggregators, carriers, infrastructure providers, or tower operators) especially when using Internet to submit your messages. The content is transmitted as a plain text making it easy to eavesdrop.
• Depending on the carrier, messages larger than 160 characters (varies per carrier) are rejected, truncated or broken down into multiple messages that may be delivered out of sequence.
• Standard SMS is typically assumed delivered as soon as the carrier submits the message over their network without having any confirmed response from the recipient’s mobile handset. Hence, there is no definitive way to determine if a message was received by the recipient or whether it was opened or just simply deleted. Standard SMS does not provide timing around any of these events.

So what is Secure SMS?

SecureSMS is a secure text messaging solution for enterprises, governments and consumers for transmitting sensitive and confidential information from handset-to-handset, server-to-handset or vice versa.

Using SecureSMS state-of-the-art mobile Micro Client, mobile phones utilize the familiar and user-friendly SMS channel to send and receive healthcare information, financial data or internal communication from others within their Circle of Trust™.

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All through Ramadan we have been talking about the fantastic Ramadan offers. Now that Eid is here, those offers are gone  and now we are hearing about mobile network operators getting ready for the spike in SMS usage which happens every Eid. As we wrote earlier, some bundles have been deactivated as part of this. That may be disappointing to some. Others are going to take to the new tools like Twitter to wish Eid greetings. Its interesting that just within the last 3-5 years, mobile phone technology has resulted in a big change in the Pakistani culture, altering the way greetings and wishes are exchanged.

Anyways, we think there’s more to Eid than sending text messages so sit back, put your phone on the side and enjoy some quality time with your friends and family! (Picture credit: Mobilink).

More from Daily Times.

Two of the five cellular phone companies have suspended their Short Messaging Service (SMS) as massive traffic could block their network on Eid days, officials said.

Lowest SMS prices coupled with bundle offers is likely to jam the network of the mobile phone companies as the subscribers’ enthusiastic greetings will increase tremendously the flow of SMS (Short Messaging Service) on the Eid Day. Officials of various mobile phone companies said that the number of SMS to be exchanged would surge 80-100 percent as compared to normal days.

They said that SMS traffic would witness a significant increase on the upcoming Eid as compared with last Eid owing to the increase in the number of subscribers base coupled with the falling SMS prices and bundle packages available this year.

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) SMS data available suggested that around 11 billion SMSes have been exchanged in the second quarter of 2008-09 whereby more than 12.22 million SMSes average have been recorded on daily basis. By the end of August 2009, the sector experts estimated that the average SMS traffic has reached more than 15 million after the addition of hundred thousands subscribers since December.

Mostly, customers draft their own text but mobile phone companies and different social networking websites also have exclusive text on different occasion particularly for Eid. These texts are good in length and consist of more than one SMS, which the customers do not hesitate to send to their relatives and friends. Normally, one SMS consists of 160 words, which increase with the number of text words.

We are expecting 100 percent surge in SMSes exchange on Eid Day, whereas the traffic will start increasing on the chand raat and second day of the Eid, an executive of the cellular phone said.

He said the company has increased its SMS traffic capacity on its network so that the customers are satisfied. Besides, MMS, international and domestic calls would also generate healthy revenues in the upcoming days.

Obviously, no responsible person would attempt texting while driving. What about checking emails on your phone while driving? I suspect that there are a lot more people who have done that. A recent article about texting and driving prompted a lot of discussion – as expected. One shcool of thought is to enact a law to tackle this. The other point of view (and this is the minority) is that eating or applying make up is also dangerous, why don’t we ban that as well?

Here’s one issue in these contentious times that almost everyone appears to agree on: Driving while typing out text messages on a mobile phone is dumb, potentially deadly and should be banned.

So let’s just ban driving while texting, right? Not so fast. Nothing’s ever that easy, especially when powerful economic interests and different levels of government are involved.

Later this month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration plans to convene a “summit” on “distracted driving.” The issue of driving while texting, or DWT, will be high on the agenda. For the first time, it appears that most major interest groups involved are for doing something to make DWT illegal.

First there’s debate about what distracted driving is. Then there are conflicts of interest.

Distracted driving is a broad term that can be applied to a wide variety of behaviors. You can be distracted behind the wheel by talking on a mobile phone held in your hand, talking on a phone using an earpiece, or talking on a phone using a hands-free “telematics” system embedded in your car. You can be distracted by a messy cheeseburger or a hot cup of coffee. You can be distracted by an iPod that’s not playing what you want, or a passenger, or a map or paper with directions on it. You can be distracted by a ball game on the radio, or a billboard.

Some safety advocates argue that any use of mobile communications while on the road is dangerous, and should be stopped. On their side is a body of research that suggests that the mere act of talking to someone not in the car—whether the phone’s up against your head, or in a cupholder while you wear an earpiece—is a risky overload of a driver’s cognitive functions.

Texting with your fingers and thumbs, however, is clearly a problem. A recent Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study found that manual text messaging elevated the risk of a crash or near crash to more than 23 times higher than “nondistracted” driving.

Auto makers and their suppliers are working on systems that will allow drivers to send and receive text messages using voice-activated systems. They don’t want those features outlawed.

In the meantime, given how hard it will be for police to enforce legislated bans, the best way to curb texting while driving probably is to make it socially unacceptable, particularly among teens

Where do you stand on all this?

A cross post from Basit Ali’s blog

Today, Ufone has announced the launch of a very interesting service named UConnect. The service allows you to use your cellphone to control several activities on your PC. In addition to remote PC access the service combos Push-Email-over-SMS as well. It may sound a bit complex but in my initial experience I find the service very easy-to-use. No downloads and installation required on phone, no complex configurations, no issue of proxies and firewalls on your pc, in short, if you have data enabled phone, it’ll work just fine. Following is the list of main features of UConnect:

• Remote file access: You can access the files on your PC remotely. No download required on your phone and it all works on the mobile-browser.
• Remote access to your Outlook emails: Access your MS-Outlook emails on the go using the mobile-browser
• PC control: Allows you to restart, shutdown, hibernate, sleep and log off your machine.
• Multiple PC remote access: Above three features can be used on more than one PCs
• Push Email: Sends you SMS and Wap-Push notifications for every incoming email and you can configure up to 5 email accounts with it. You can even use it on a non-smart phone.
• 512 MB web-space: Each user will be allocated 512 MB space on the server.

How to subscribe?

Simply SMS SUB to 292 to sign up for the service.

How it works

• You can access the service on the phone by visiting http://uconnect.ufone.com on their mobile browser. Once signed up you can login and configure push email from here.
• You can download UConnect client software to be installed on your PC from http://uconnect.ufone.com that allows remote access on your phone.

Please download the user manual for further details.

Anticipation

I’ll come back on this blog with a detailed review of the product, its features and price later, but right now I’m really excited about this product. File sharing, remote file and PC access is something that has not been available earlier, at least as a VAS in Pakistan. Moreover, Push Email over SMS is a service that targets a big number of users and will help bring Email access to masses.

Please wait for the detailed review to follow.