Archive for the 'Mobile Companies' Category

SBP Considering Teleco Led Branchless Banking

We have taken a look at the permissible branchless banking models in our earlier post and have seen them all to bank led. At the third international mobile commerce conference recently held State Banks’s Deputy Governor, Yaseen Anwar, has indicated of a Teleco led model of branchless banking is being considered. The staff report from Dawn News gives the details.

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Billing Errors: Poll Results

Here are the results from our most recent poll on billing errors. This matches the results from PTA survey and shows that billing errors are common and a source of problem for consumers. After service quality issues, this is probably the worst that a consumer faces.

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How to Handle SMS Spam – A Review of Policies

Dealing with spam, unwanted calls and stalkers can be very stressful. Here’s some  information and links which can help you cope with this. While looking at this issue, we researched on the privacy policies of mobile companies operating in Pakistan. Out of 5 mobile network operators, we found 2 privacy policies which were posted online.

For your reference you can block the user following the guidelines presented in our prior posts about Call and SMS Blocking, here and here. Unfortunately getting rid of the problem is not always that straightforward. For example, see this TGP discussion in which one member’s number was used – spoofed would be a better choice of word – for sending unwanted SMS.

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Pakistan Mobile Operator Forecast 2009-2014

Research and Market, the world’s largest market research resource have recently published forecast reports of next five years for mobile operators of Pakistan and other countries. The key points of the report as mentioned in its summary give a very interesting picture of the state of telecom industry in Pakistan.

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New Poll – Billing Errors by Telecom Companies

We are conducting a poll to collect consumer feedback on telecom billing errors, resolution process and improvements that can be made. As one example, PTA recently issued a show-cause notice to PTCL for, among other things, a high number of billing error (79 errors per 10,000 bills). Below are some statistics for reference.

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These are from a survey conducted by PTA and PTCL in 2009 and represent the average of the nationwide results. We often hear that consumers of other telecom companies have similar issues with billing and we would like to get your opinion about this. We also want to know if the process of resolution of these issues is working well or not.

Djuice International Offer

Here’s the promotion for Djuice ‘Pakka Dost’ international offer. Its one of those “limited time” offers. Note the fine print on the side: 50-paisa is for 30-seconds.

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Price Fixing By Mobile Telecom Companies

Rohan Samarajiva of LIRNEAsia has published a post titled “Pakistan Competition Commission appears to have mobile telcos on the ropes“. The post describes how evidence emerged on price fixing for balance inquiries and steps taken by Competition Commission of Pakistan. The details of this case are quite interesting and offer many insights into the minds of telecom decision makers.

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2009 Ends With 97.6 Million Mobile Subscribers

PTA has just released 2009 December mobile subscriber stats. Though it would have been nice if  the industry could hit 100 million mark in calendar year 2009, we are content about the overall progress (7.6 million net additions) of the telecom segment. Mobilink had a good last quarter, ending with 30.8 million susbcribers and retained its market share of 32% from the beginning of the year. Telenor is firm at second spot. Ufone also showed good progress (18.5 M) towards the end of year but overall it fell behind Warid (18.8 M) which became the number 3 in terms of total subscribers.

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Dadyal City Has the Best Speech Quality In All of Pakistan?

PTA recently published results from their Quality of Service tests. If you look at the results for speech quality of mobile service providers , it shows that Dadyal in Azad Kashmir has the best!! Congratulations to Dadyalians.

As we figure out explanations to which city has the best service (and there could be many ways this could be decided) there are other questions that one wonders about. According to these results performance of all operator is below the benchmark set by PTA. Was the bar too high or do we have really bad speech quality??

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Operator’s QOS Not Up To Standard – PTA

ptaDawn News has reported today that PTA in its recent QOS survey have found that operators have failed to meet the set standards despite being asked to improve on it. PTA have issues a show-cause notice to all cellular operators over this issue. I wish PTA gives out the details of the survey to general public like they did in 2007, so that we can judge operators on basis of their QOS.

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PTA – Mobile Banking, 3G and Local Content

The latest PR affirms State Bank of Pakistan and PTA are closely working on a unified policy for mobile banking that will connect all banks of the country with cellular mobile operators for mobile transactions. No mentions about where the existing mobile banking framework will stand with it.

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Mobile Phone Software Monetisation Models

As the number of mobile applications increase its important for developers to understand the shifts in the mobile app development ecosystem. They need to know the best ways to capture value and to make money. Recently I came across a good presentation by VisionMobile called Mobile Mega Trends 2010, which among other things talks about the monetisation models and revenues. The first diagram from VisionMobile shows the 4 quadrants (device/cloud and pre/post-sales) which are important. The second diagram talks about the value and revenues in each quadrant. One of the key point is the value after sales which can come from inventory leasing, analytics, service distribution and service management.
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