State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Smart bundle is a new offer from Warid for new postpaid customers where they get a BlackBerry plus all the works – voice, sms, data as one bundle. With this deal you can avail a BlackBerry Pearl 8120 smartphone along with discounts and waivers on line rent & security. For the first 6 months you will get Black Berry smartphone services free of cost, based on the quota that your plan provides (described below).

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We have all adored Warid’s Glow Package and now Warid brings another attraction for the prepaid tech savies – Prepaid GPRS Bucket. We had heard of SMS buckets but this thing is something new, perhaps a way the mobile industry gets a solution to the problem of rare data services usage by prepaid consumers. Allowing customers to pre-purchase the megabytes (or MBs like we call it) and top them off when the need arises.

Buy, use it all and buy again.

The offering is being positioned at a competitive price to facilitate prepaid customers for GPRS usage and allows a 30day validity period to the customer.The bucket gives the customer a total of 10MB of data capacity which has a validity of 30days from purchase. The customer is under complete freedom to procure a single or multiple buckets at any given time as required.

How to Subscribe:

To procure the GPRS Bucket from handset, the customer composes a message and sends the keyword “Data” to 3282.

Available for: The service is available for Prepaid customers with active GPRS services Only.

Subscription Charges: PKR 30 +tax

Technology Review reports that researchers have been able to hijack mobile phone connections and data.

In a presentation today at Black Hat Europe, a computer-security conference in Amsterdam, a group of researchers claimed to have found a way to hijack the data sent to and from mobile phones. The researchers say that the attack might be used to glean passwords or to inject malicious software onto a device.

Mobile phones are becoming ever more useful for transmitting data in addition to making voice calls, and they’re increasingly being used for sensitive activities such as online banking, as well as for searching the Internet and downloading mobile games.

The new attack relies on a protocol that allows mobile operators to give a device the proper settings for sending data via text message, according to Roberto Gassira, Cristofaro Mune, and Roberto Piccirillo, security researchers for Mobile Security Lab, a consulting firm based in Italy. By faking this type of text message, according to the protocol an attacker can create his own settings for the victim’s device. This would allow him to, for example, reroute data sent from the phone via a server that he controls. The researchers say that the technique should work on any handset that supports the protocol, as long as the attacker knows which network the victim belongs to and the network does not block this kind of message.

The wireless panorama is changing at a high-speed. Starting with the 1^st Generation of communication networks (1G) in the early 80s and many evolutions we now have 4^th Generation to talk about. In the last 3 years we have seen the deployments of 3G networks and most recently the work on 4G is on the peak.

From 1G to 4G we have seen changes in the modulation schemes, duplexing methods, multiple access technologies, data rate, speech coding, antenna systems and other aspects which have played a role to make communication efficient over the period of time.

But the question remains, do we need them? So much of an advancement of technology, has it really given us benefit in terms of both services and economics (cost) ?

Let’s take a look at each generation.

1^st Generation (1G) had the famous AMPS standard. It offered basic voice services with cost being high initially but went down with time.

2^nd Generation (2G) is well known for the GSM technology. It started off with offering digital voice services and then we had the short message service (SMS). The 2G changed the lives of many, it became impossible to live without a cell phone. Initially these services came with costs not in the range of average consumer but still gained popularity and the cost went down with time. Earlier a call received was charged, but today we have SMS packages, Friends and Family offer, One Free number offer and many more.

Then came the evolutions of 2G, we saw high speed data links on GPRS or EDGE. This laid the foundation of mobile internet. Once again the initial costs were high and it offered limited services. This evolution raised many questions on its actual need. Why need mobile internet with limited services when we have broadband or dial-ups at offices and homes? Although, these services are not as popular as SMS, but with time they have captured a small proportion of the population. Businesses today rely heavily on GPRS/EDGE to get online to check emails and act upon them immediately. Social networks are fast expanding on GPRS/EDGE, examples include facebook and twitter. With all this happening the cost again has gone down.

I would leave this post here for discussions and continue it later.

“You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” Scott McNealy – Former CEO Of SUN.

Perhaps McNealy had Pakistan in mind when he uttered his famous words about the lack of privacy and how to deal with it. Most of us are well aware of the lax privacy situation in Pakistan. Even with the lower expectations, the news of Police getting easy access to personal phone records was still a shock to may. The official announcement has not been made yet and preparations are under way to facilitate this. The core of the problem is lack of transparency, safeguards and trust. If you look at the public reaction, there is wide agreement on a single point: given the track record of police department, this access will be exploited and abused.

For the small percentage of population who understand the meaning of privacy and the implications of blatant intrusion, it is a matter of great concern. Admittedly, privacy is not a high priority item for Pakistan. Once in a while something happens like cell phone customer information at bread shops, a few people complain, perhaps a few bloggers and journalists write about it and that’s it. We even had experts from other countries come over and explain to us about the need for protecting privacy and sensitive information. The government and regulation agencies shrug it off – after all they can point to the law and order situation. Oh well, consider this one more cost of living in the information age.