PTA has yet again paid lipservice to the cause of wide broadband penetration in Pakistan. At a seminar organized on the theme of Wimax by South Asia Middle East North Africa (SAMENA) Telecommunications Council, PTA’s chief repeated the combo of words that could easily be created by anyone associated with the industry.
More clear, practical announcements on the broadband penetration cause would have been far more useful. Yes, PTA has published a consultation paper that aims to bring down the costs of Internet bandwidth in Pakistan but bandwidth tariffs are just one part of the broadband proliferation. Matters relating to IP traffic exchange between service providers, local loop unbundling, application agnostic Internet infrastructure, development of localized contents, IPv6 adoption via incentives and legislation, subsidies on local telehouses in the private sector and many other factors are needed to kick-off a broadband revolution in Pakistan in its true sense.
September 19, 2006 at 5:38 am
“..Matters relating to IP traffic exchange between service providers..”
Does anyone know where the IP traffic within Pakistan stands with respect to localized exchange? I was under the impression that there was some projects in place to create a NAP somewhere in KHI for all Pakistani ISPs to peer and exchange local traffic between each other instead of shooting the traffic across the pond from one ISP only to get it back to another..
Has there been any headway on such projects at all in the past 4-5 years?
Omer
September 21, 2006 at 10:08 am
As long PTCL is there one would just dreamed of things like NAP
September 21, 2006 at 7:06 pm
Omer: At SANOG8, we had a BoF for IX. While not a lot has materialized yet, we at least have an IX list of interested ISPs up and running and some talks have started for taking things in our own hand for inter ISP traffic exchange.
January 18, 2007 at 11:23 am
SAMENA is quite popular in MIDDLE-EAST.Its nice to know pakistan is getting developed so fast. At least people living at far off places (rural) will get costless wireless broadband unlike DSL/Wi-Fi.