Vopium is a free piece of software, which you download to your mobile phone so that you can use VOIP to make calls from your mobile phone. It uses least cost routing (such as WiFi when available) to helps you save money on international calls and SMS. For details and rates check out Vopium website and see how it compares with other services. It works in 45 countries.
Vopium supports more than 900 phones including iPhone. For calls to Pakistan, Vopium’s Call Pakistan package has competitive calling rates. Currently Vopium offers double minute for Call Pakistan offer – users gets 500 minutes instead of 250. Here is more about the offer.
Until the 23rd of September Vopium doubles your minutes!
Get 2 for the price of 1. Buy a “Call Pakistan”-package (250 minutes) and get another one on top for FREE during the campaign period. Receive 500=2 X 250 min for only USD 18.55 and call any network, both landline and mobile, in Pakistan. A package is valid for 30 days.
Vopium just launched its mobile VoIP solution in 25 new countries in regions including North and South America, Western and Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia Pacific.
Tanveer Sharif, CEO of Vopium says:
The roll out of Vopium in 25 new countries meets the ever increasing demand for high quality and low price international telephony. Due to the present economic climate consumers are keen to cut cost wherever possible. International telephony rates are still outrageously high, but with the geographic expansion, we are delighted to solve that problem by enabling even more consumers to save heavily on international phone calls.
Braintel has completed a full circle regarding its fight with PTA. A few weeks ago Braintel sent an email to its customers with an attachment which showed that the services have been restored based on a decision by the High Court. That is good news for expat Pakistanis. However the letter also asked customers to make changes to their account setting. I am sharing the process of getting your Braintel line working again:
On the device settings, you need to change UserID and AuthID so that 210, the first three digits of the ID are changed to 1001 (four digits). That is, 210-#### changes to 1001-####.
Call customer service (2100786 from braintel. 0092-42-2100786 or 0044-1785-800786 otherwise) and make sure that your number is provisioned properly. It may take a while for the change to become effective.
For those who use Linksys PAP2 device, see the setting changes in the screenshot below.
Rates at the time of this post are reasonable – probably the main reason why tens of thousands of customers put up with the service instability and changes!
Lahore Local: Rs 0.90+Taxes
Fixed Line and WLL Nation Wide: Rs 2.0+Taxes
Local and Nation Wide mobile network: Rs 2.75+Taxes
Venture Beat writes about the acquisition of Jaxtr by a company Sabse Bolo (Hindi/Urdu for Talk To Everyone) and what it means for the audio conferencing in emerging telecom markets.
Two weeks ago, a quiet Silicon Valley-based voice company named Sabse bought Jaxtr, a “voice-over-internet-protocol” startup that lets you make cheap calls anywhere using your computer instead of a phone. It wasn’t totally clear why. While formative web voice companies like Skype have gone on to make money, many others have struggled. In Jaxtr’s case, it had raised more than $20 million, gained some 10 million users, but wasn’t — apparantly — seeing the sort of traction and revenue it was hoping for. So I talked to Sabse chief executive Yogesh Patel, a serial entrepreneur with a background in the mobile industry, about why he made the purchase.
First, a little about Sabse. Patel describes it as a “telephony-as-a-service platform,” by which he means it offers a suite of audioconferencing services for telecommunications carriers around the world. It’s proving a good fit for emerging markets, he claims, where not everyone has access to a computer. It lets people talk across web voice connections, landlines or mobile phones, convert faxes to emails, and other voice communication services. BT’s Ribbit, for example, also offers telephony as a platform service. Patel praises Ribbit but says his company’s integration of various voice services — as well as local data centers and networks it has built in Asia — have helped it gain more customers in emerging markets. At this point, Sabse is almost profitable through revenue-sharing deals with carriers, like Malaysia’s TM, and is talking to dozens of potential clients around the world, Patel tells me.
Menlo Park, Cali.-based Jaxtr, meanwhile, provides a relatively simple service for making VoIP calls. Give Jaxtr your phone number, either on its home site or on one of its embeddable widgets, then call Jaxtr will give you a new number — call it, and you’ll get a prompt to call the destination number. It’s a more roundabout way of making calls versus just picking up the phone and dialing an international number, but it’s free or very cheap to do. Patel sees Jaxtr as Sabse’s path to get more direct to consumer business. He’ll use it to upsell users into Sabse’s audioconferencing services, and he’s planning to run voice ads within Jaxtr (it doesn’t currently). As Jaxtr has a US userbase, Sabse will hope to get these people using its other services as well.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Sabse’s funding is undisclosed, but comes from its founders, including Patel as well as Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia.
During the many years of telecom industry’s growth, PTA has never been able to clearly define a reasonable VOIP policy. Recently PTA asked ISPs to detect and monitor traffic for voice over internet protocol and report any illegal usage. The Internet Services Providers of Pakistan (ISPAK) has taken a position against PTA directives asking them to set up expensive systems for the detection and monitoring of illegal voices traffic available unlimited on internet. Daily Times reports:
ISPAK Convener Wahaj us Siraj said PTA has invested a huge amount of operators’ contribution for installation of such a facility and this matter has to be tackled by PTA itself instead of passing on additional burden on ISPs. He said the ISPs could install the VoIP monitoring and mitigating facility if PTA provides funding for such a facility as the industry is already in debt due to selling below the costs and anti competitive practices. There are more than 50 ISPs operating across the country. As per policy, they contributed 0.5 percent of their revenue to Universal Service Fund (USF); 0.1 percent on the account of Research and Development and hundreds of thousands of fee charges for renewal of licences. ISPs cannot take any action against any customer doing illegal VoIP as they are lacking statutory powers to do so, he said and added that if PTA informs of illegal activity done by any customer to the concerned ISP, the ISPs’ action can only be limited to locking that customer’s account and providing customer details to PTA.
ISPs also termed PTA’s action of blocking the IP addresses on internet gateways without any prior notification and evidence as insufficient. They said they had been suffering badly, which has been brought to the notice many times in recent past to the regulator.
PTA has its automated blocking of IP addresses that carry illegal voice traffic that is termination and/or origination of voice packets in a bid to check grey traffic flowing into the country
On the other hand, Chairman PTA Dr Muhammad Yaseen told Daily Times that setting up of VoIP system is not a rocket science that could not be done by ISPs without the assistance of authority.
They only need to install software on their network to block illegal traffic of voices, which they are reluctant to do, he said adding that there are scores of culprits violating authority’s law under the very nose of ISPs. Dr Yaseen added that the authority has warned all the ISPs again and it has decided to conduct massive operation against all the illegal traffic users as per prescribed laws. He further said the ISPs should cooperate with the authority to stop illegal practices instead of supporting users’ violating watchdog’s laws.
PTA announced publicly that all (registered) call centres should provide their IP addresses to PSEB to make sure that their voice traffic is not blocked. Since the inception of technical facility in May 2008 at the PTA, the IP addresses found to be involved in illegal activities were being blocked manually and in the process, over 14 million minutes (worth around Rs 100 million) have been saved on monthly basis. Now these would be automatically blocked if any IP, not authorised to carry voice is found doing so. Under the current policy, only LDIs and international call centres are authorised to carry voice across national boundaries.
It was a total surprise for me when I came to know that as per PTA (Pakistan Telecommunication Authority) Act (laws and regulations) voice traffic over bandwidth of ISP’s and DSL operators is illegal. This Public Information Bulletin of PTA confirms it. The information bulletin also terms such voice traffic as “grey traffic”, traffic which is illegal.
So, in the recent meeting on the issue of Grey Traffic held at PTA Headquarters, PTA has directed all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to ensure that their networks are not used for illegal call/voice termination and such cases of grey telephony are brought into the notice of PTA immediately.
Does this mean NO Voice Chat on Broadband ? No Skype?. I think PTA should reconsider on this move and make necessary amendments in its Act to facilitate services for home users.
Here is an interesting – and hilarious – video which provides commentary on a lot of phone and messaging services. David Pogue is an author and well known personal technology columnist. Here he is talking from a US perspective but a lot of the points he makes apply equally well to Pakistan and other countries with high mobile usage. By the way, TED is an awesome site and I would recommend it to all who are interested in hearing about interesting ideas and views from impressive speakers.
The second commercial Wimax network went live in Pakistan (Karachi) recently. For the South Asain nation of 160 million (half of which are young adults), these cutting edge WiMAX networks are a cause for celebration. Mobilink (one of the most successful ventures of the international telecoms giant Orascom Telecom) which has the highest subscriber base of over 30 million subscribers (out of the total 80 million users nationwide) has launched its Wimax brand called Mobilink Infinity.
The network is essentially 802.16e based mobile Wimax and has been launched in Karachi, the commercial capital of Pakistan and also world’s second most populous city in the world with 16 million citizens. The CPE costs Rs 6,000 ($77) one-time and monthly subscriptions are available in 256kbps, 512 kbps and 1 mb categories. The integrated VoIP based analog voice port allows local loop telephony to the user with preferential rates for the (dominating) Moblilink network.
Earlier Pakistan got the worlds largest nationwide Wimax Network from Wateen Telecom , a new telecoms business venture of the Abu Dhabi Group that also owns the popular cellular brand Warid in Pakistan (and now in some other countries – Congo and Georgia). Wateen’s Wimax (built on Motorola Wimax gear) has received mixed response and some believe that the less than perfect launch of the much hyped product has more to do with the company’s operations rather than the technology limitations. The problems have accumulated enough to give Wimax a bad name. New operators are expected to avoid the technology name (wimax) in their upcoming products in the local market due to this reason.
A few weeks ago, Worldcall (an overseas investment of Omantel of Oman in Pakistan) launched its CDMA EvDO services on top of its popular CDMA based Wireless Local Loop voice services. Marketed under the catchy marketing campaign using Footloose, the service uses Anydata’s USB modem as its EvDO CPE.
Please note the changes mentioned below, as posted on the Braintel website. All Braintel users, please test this beta release and share your feedback on the newly introduced “extra step” which is needed to complete the outgoing call. I am thankful that the service is functional and will monitor it over the next few days for issues, quality and performance.
We are please to inform you that the service has been fully functional now as of 8th Sep 2008 (2:40pm PKT Daylight ). To avoid misuse of our service by grey service provider, we have made a small amendment in the service. We are introducing Computer Assisted Dialing system (CAD) that will help us to overcome the misuse of our service.
In CAD system you have to dial your destination number just the way you used to dial before 4th August 2008; after dialing your destination number press # key and wait for few sec and then simply hang-up the line; your phone will ring back within 45sec and you’ll be hooked with your dialed number.
If the destination number is busy, conventionally you have to try again and again, in CAD system you don’t have to dial again and again but our CAD system will do the rest, just the way a private secretary or your company’s telephone operator make the call on your behalf.
CAD system is new and unique; you may experience some intermittent disconnections during its beta testing.
Tariq Mustafa has written an excellent post about how to fix the Internet Telephony In Pakistan. Tariq argues that Internet-based services should be defined as new class of services with clear rules and regulations – something which PTA has been unable (or unwilling?) to do. After Tariq wrote this piece, the Indian telecom regulator announced that VOIP will be allowed – that puts the issue in further perspective and highlights the importance of fixing this mess in Pakistan.
For those who do not know, Tariq has been involved with Internet and technology in Pakistan since early 90s. There are very few experts who can rival the combination of his knowledge of telecom industry in Pakistan and his leading role in sharing information via online communities. Tariq notes that:
The main issue here is the ability of the LL operator to replace the traditional copper for its end user or the expensive 1900 Mhz WLL frequencies for its end user with the ‘Internet cloud’. It is technically possible but the use of Internet for voice problem had its own fair share of cloudiness. At the center of this debate is the use of the word ‘long distance’ – whether it is to be taken physically or network-wise.
When last LDI/LL licenses were issued, the LL license itself was a cheap affair – though the spectrum (both for 1900 Mhz and 3.5 Ghz) was auctioned at high prices. At that time, a number of Internet savvy people – Brain included – took the LL license only banking on new VoIP technologies to come to their rescue later.
A few VoIP technology companies (a cross between operators and technology vendors if you will) had been constantly chasing the smaller LL operators (as described above) evangelizing the use of VoIP in local loop operations where the ‘affinity to local numbers’ is the actual ‘good sold’ and the profit comes in from volumes of such ‘numbers’ beings sold worldwide at fixed monthly rates (but not actually always being used).
These VoIP technology companies met some success during the past couple of years with a number of LL operators signing up them either as partners or just technology vendors. At that time, cellular industry was priming and people, operators and the regulator somehow had little time to attend to this possibly controversial issue.
Now that the market is nearing a tele-density of over 50% and market consolidation has started, these by-issues will get more attention (and probably get more debated).
PTA’s clarification on use of VoIP (available from PTA’s website and discussed on some related online forums) is of little help as it leaves room for guessing by the readers.
My personal position here is that given the non-deterministic nature of public Internet (specially when the bandwidth is not directly coming from a T1 operator) as a transport mechanism for real time traffic, such ‘Internet-glued’ LL services should be allowed – they will always be placed at number 2 in terms of voice quality and deterministic performance. Such services could be declared a new class of service with clear requirement of informing end consumers about emergency services not working on them as well as possible degraded voice performance due to third party packet networks that happen to lie between the end networks. Given a considerable population of expatriate Pakistanis around the world, these services stand a fairly good chance of catching on in popularity and can earn some part of the much needed forex for country by the local companies offering such services worldwide.
Users of the popular VOIP servcie, Braintel, are facing problems with outgoing calls. The message says: “All circuits are busy – please try your call later”. Users have experienced this since first week of August. Braintel officials have posted a note on their home page (see above). For more on this see this discussion.
This is one of the longest outage of service from Braintel. I mean, how long does it take to upgrade servers?Does anyone has some idea of when this will be resolved? Perhaps someone from Braintel can share their side of the story?
Super Technologies started its journey from the (then) innovative idea of Internet faxing back in 1987, morphed into a VoIP service company with a Pakistani network, changed to a hosted VOIP platform and finally, the team hit the sweet spot (incidentally as a by-product) of becoming a marketplace for an unusual telecommunication resource that nobody had not spotted before in the same context. The company has a number of developers working OUT of Pakistan.
So what is DIDX and what do they do? DIDX is about selling and buying an unusual, untapped asset that a lot of telecos are sitting upon – the E.164 numbers they give out to ‘their’ subscribers who take one (or more) service from them.
One of the core forces behind DIDX is Rehan Ahmed Allahwala. Rehan works alongside his American mates who front the company worldwide in commercial and marketing domains. Rehan leads the team that works on new ideas …… Read more.
On a related note for job seekers, Super Technologies is hiring for full time staff and interns – see this post and check out their site to learn nore and apply.
TelecomPk.Net is a leading source of information and analysis about Pakistan Telecom industry. 
