State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

PTA yesterday released the subscriber numbers for January 2010. The year begins with a drop in overall subscriber base to 95.4 Million as compared to 97.6 Million at December end dropping the mobile density to 58.20%.

The operator suffering the most loss was Warid, losings 2.6 Million subscriber and making its market share 16.97% which was 19.4% in December 2009. Tough time for the new CEO.

All other operators showed some growth with Mobilink still leading the market and Telenor following it. As a result of drops in Warid, Ufone now ranks at third position.

With Telenor bringing innovations to the mobile banking and Mobilink also planning to penetrate with the same soon, the competition will definitely elevate as the year unfolds.

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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There is a lot of talk about the news that Punjab Government has unanimously passed a resolution banning late night offers/packages by mobile phone operators. Daily times reports it as follows:

Members of the Punjab Assembly (MPAs) on Tuesday unanimously passed a resolution banning late night packages offered by mobile networks at cheap rates in keeping with “moral and social values” and to “maintain the youth’s health and prevent vice”.

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Ezetop, an international group focused on international and online mobile phone top-up today. It provides services of top-up to any  phone back home for many countries, including Pakistan.

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Zong has recently introduced its ‘Family Pack’, by which you, your friends or your family can talk to freely without worry about how long you call and how much its going to cost.

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We wish all stake holders of the Pakistan Telecom Industry a Very Happy New Year. At the beginning of December 2009 we started a poll about Your Favorite Cellular Operator – 2009 and with the end of 2009, the poll has closed.

We are here with the results of the poll where readers had to choose their favorite out of the five. From a total of 1060 votes Ufone stands out the most favorite and Warid being the second favorite with a difference of  just 1%.

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After a tumultuous year,  the Pakistan telecom industry is back on the road to recovery. Its good to see November 2009 show some healthy growth of about 800K new subscribers. Total cellular subscribers are 96.7 million (with ~285K for SCO and AJK). Here are the month-to-month gains with the most successful operator at the top:

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Dawn 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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Last but not least, comes Zong with it BlackBerry Solution in Pakistan. All other operators are already offering this service making competition tough for Zong. Recently Warid came up with its Smart Bundle offer to attract in users for the BlackBerry, Zong also will have to do more than just the launch. For now, the official PR has the details.

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Just recently Zong has come up with an application based e-mail service “Zong M@il“. The service enables Zong customers to access all their e-mail accounts on their mobile phone through an application client. Customers interested in staying connected to their email accounts can do it through Zong mail without necessarily having to buy high-end mobile handsets.

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Earlier I mentioned about the Warid overseas SIM information correction help, a similar service is being provided by all other cellular operators. The process is more or less the same for all.

For Telenor check the details here, for Ufone follow this link,  Zong customers can get the details from here and Mobilink the details can be found at this link.

Overseas customers must make use of this service and get all their information corrected at the earliest.

Obnoxious calls/missed calls or SMSs are sometimes very disturbing. In this post I will do a round-up of the Block Services being offered by our telecom operators.

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