LDI-backed Anti-voip Move – Now More Evil

There is nothing bad in an Internet world than to fear new technologies. In fact, fearing new technologies in general is a bad idea itself.

Pakistan – like the rest of the developing countries – stands strong as a potential beneficiary from the worldwide ICT related businesses provided a liberal Internet policy is adopted at all levels.

When PTCL was a monopoly in telecommunications in Pakistan and in came the cellular operators, positive things happened for the consumers – services improved, rates declined and availability got almost ubiquitous. Of course, the financial success that the cellcos met in Pakistan is an over-stated fact.

The left-behinds in all the high-water mark events mentioned above were the LDI operators who, while started off with great zeal and put in a lot of money too, found the telecoms environment too diluted and with much of undercutting going on. The rates (for termination inside Pakistan) went as low as 1 cent per min for wholesale carriers. A number of LDI operators burnt out in these conditions never to be seen again.

Later, around the beginning of this year (2008), sanity finally prevailed and the LDI operators and the authority decided that it was time to end the next to free rates to Pakistan termination traffic and raised the nominal tariff to 10 cents per minute. This move, which was essentially about LDIs putting their own house in order, alone injected a new life in their business. Salaries for the staff started coming in time and new equipment started being ordered by the operators.

Despite some undercutting, the rates in the international market for wholesale termination inside Pakistan are still above the 7 cents per minute mark and this leaves a considerable room for the operators to keep and take their business forward. According to rough industry estimates, only the recorded business is worth in access of 700 million minutes (or $35 million @ 5c/min) per month (grey traffic not included).

The LDI operators, in an effort to pump more out of this new found oil well, requested en mass the PTA to go after the grey traffic operators and invested in equipment that claims to detect and mitigate voip traffic in real time. This equipment has been on the international exit points in Pakistan. Suspected IP traffic was detected and investigated to see if it grey, or belongs to an un-intimated call center. This stuff was reportedly being done manually so far.

So far, the business-saving and law-enforcing arrangements by the LDIs and PTA appear to be logical and permissible. No one likes grey operators – the steal legal traffic from licensed players, do not pay taxes and do not help when LEA wants their help in tracing crimes and these guys are generally of, well, grey character themselves.

But when you see this item in today’s The News, it starts getting really uncomfortable:

PTA to start automated blocking of IPs
By By our correspondent
8/27/2008
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) will start automated blocking of Internet Protocol Addresses (IPs), involved in illegal termination/origination of international traffic, in a bid to check grey traffic flowing into the country. The facility will be operational within the next few days.

This was announced by PTA Chairman Dr Muhammad Yaseen in a meeting with the CEOs of major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) of the country held at the PTA headquarters on Tuesday.

He requested all the ISPs to declare their IP addresses along-with the antecedents of their customers so that illegal telecom traffic could be monitored. It was emphasised that the operators should oversee their customers to make sure they are not involved in grey traffic termination. He sought the operators’ cooperation to stem the menace of grey telephony.

The ISPs appreciated the recent steps taken by the PTA including an announcement in the press wherein call centres were asked to provide their IP addresses to the PSEB to ensure uninterrupted services.

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 Rs100 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.

The problems with the above arrangements are many:

1. There ‘real-time’ nature of the voip blocking apparently takes away the manual process and the sanity that can possibly accompany these efforts
2. The regulator will now essentially be ‘peeking’ inside the contents of the traffic. True, they are looking for voice packets but one is justified to think, ‘what’s next’?
3. PC-to-PC voip traffic – which unfortunately has been neatly wrapped in clouds of uncertainty by the regulator despite the industry literally begging for clearer guidelines on this topic – might get disrupted. The optimistic take here is that the Naurus gear would be intelligent enough to have thresholds that can distinguish between an occasional PC-to-PC voip caller and a bulk grey operator.
4. For the network applications administrators, troubleshooting will now get more complex as the high-end IP transit operators are no more acting transparently and the traiff is getting actively peeked inside and the Naurus system would be fiddling with it if it passes the defined litmus tests of being grey voice.

The LDI operators are best advised to invest more into the reliability and reach of their network instead of lobbying the regulator to take effects that could be counter ICT development. The industry is clearly against illegal activities but at the same time, a liberal Internet regime is one of the prime enabler of a saner IT featuring future of Pakistan.

All are requested to keep an eye on their network performances with the possibility of network issues cropping up due to this imminent implementation of automatic voip traffic suppression.

And let us hope the equipment vendor is not making us a guinea pigs for their new software releases!

Internet-based LL Services

Fellow blogger and friend Babar Bhatti has complained about the problems he is facing in using Braintel’s local loop services (probably from out there in US). A reader has commented on this citing a PTA ban on such operations by the local loop operators in Pakistan.

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.

PTA Meets on PKNIC Issue

PTA has conducted a meeting of various stakeholders and industry representatives on the issue of PKNIC today in Islamabad. There have been a series of interesting posts on TGP on this topic since this morning and we expect a detailed unofficial minutes of meeting by one caring participant of this meeting soon.

The Tube Trouble and Why its a Good News

The You Tube blocking (orders by PTA to ISPs can be found here) in Pakistan has taken the local blogosphere by the storm – for obvious reason. The news was broken and extensively discussed at various local mailing lists.

The highly sticky video website contributes as much as 1/10th of the entire Internet bandwidth according to some estimates. That’s a crazy big statement.

Every technology blog that has any Pakistani connection has a post about this major disruptive development. While most of the fellows are obviously mad on this blocking, my take is that we might be better off having this issue. The persistent problem (of Internet censorship done the wrong way) is not being intermittently flashed to us any more – instead, this event throws it right into our faces.

That Internet censorship is bad and useless is an established fact but that it happens worldwide in both developing and developed worlds is even more established fact. In the absence of compelling Internet applications in Pakistan, Internet remains the sole killer application for the broadband mass uptake the government appears to be so concerned about.

Hence, given all the boom that Pakistan is experiencing right now (and hopefully after the recent elections results of which have so far pleasantly surprised both Pakistanis and the rest of the world), it is important that we ensure that Internet remains the platform that is relevant to the population and that the Internet consumption keeps an upward consumption trend. The system needs to graduate on this front and move towards improving our infrastructure to be able to keep up with the bare minimum implementations of the various rulings given under the law of the land by the higher courts (which, no doubt, need a big and continuous help that will help them understand the technical intricacies of the cyberspace).

This blockage is huge in terms of impact. Everyone will feel it. From the end users to the media companies and micro content producers to the civil society relying on the powers of You Tube and packet video prevalence, everyone is going to talk about it. Now is the time stop using Cisco ACLs and use layer 4 solutions where the filtering must happen.

I believe this will force the PTA and the government (and the trigger happy PTCL’s PIE) to upgrade their infrastructures so that the delicate balance between civil liberties and our societal sensitivities is well kept.

Broadband Penetration – MoITT, USF @ Work

Universal Service Fund (USF) is the company formed to make use of the USF money that PTA has been generating out of the booming telecoms market of Pakistan. So far, USF has worked towards using its funds for the spread of voice services in the under-served markets of Pakistan. Of late, Ministry of Information Technology & Telecommunication has intended to guide USF to do the same towards increasing broadband penetration too.

USF, after some initial work, has concluded that there are no particular areas that could be defined as ‘under-served’ in terms of Pakistan and rather the entire Pakistan is under-served. USF has now asked MoITT to pass a ‘determination’ towards the same fact allowing USF to utilize the funds anywhere and everywhere in Pakistan.

MoITT has published a 39 page study document on the web which seeks to establish this fact (that the entire Pakistan is under-served in broadband services). A consultation session was held in Islamabad yesterday to discuss this matter with the industry. The proceedings and details of the session are still to come out but here are my initial takes on the document and its contents:

The  major conclusion points of the documents are:

• Pakistan’s broadband penetration is very low
• Currently there are around 100K Broadband subscribers which need to be taken to 1.6 million by 2010 (1% of population)
• This low penetration is earning bad scores for us under the WSIS measuring criteria & there is a strong need to improve the same
• Three approaches have been suggested for the GoP’s intervention in this ‘dismal’ state of broadband affairs:
  • No intervention – leave it to market; slow broadband growth expected
  • Bundle with Basic Services – only rural areas will benefit; existing broadband provides will loose
  • Tackle issue with a new format – dedicated efforts are expected to yield better results; divided in various phases

The document assumes or maintains that fixed broadband is a dwindling trend and wireless broadband will finally prevail (page 23). While this is true for the last mile domain, the infrastructure is ALWAYS wired (read fiber). The guys at the MoITT need to be pointed to this omission in consideration. Pakistan need to have a good wired infrastructure before we can decide which of the two last miles options (wired or wireless) is good for us.

The study also repeatedly mentions the similarity between low tele-density and low broadband penetration. However, the applications/demand side difference between the two (voice and data) is repeatedly ignored. While it is true that the gap between 2.7% tele-density (from where our telecoms boom started off) and current 50% tele-density was one of the reasons for the boom, it was the application (voice) that was ready to exploit this gap. In the case of broadband, a similar gap exists and this gap is what the study is considering as an opportunity. However, as obvious, the difference between our last success (in cellular voice) and current challenge is that of application – do we have compelling applications that will drive the growth that can ride this gap?

The document also does not considers demand creation at all. While supply end enhancements (by way of USF subsidies towards network deployments etc) are more than welcome, a significant portion of the efforts must go towards demand creation activities. Mandatory use of electronic facilities in the business circles, tax cuts for ISPs interconnecting with each other, financial benefits to private TV channels to host streaming servers inside Pakistan, creation of public/open Internet Exchanges etc are all example of such efforts.

Wateen Competition in Catchup Frenzy

The recent launch of Wateen’s Wimax in Pakistan has put its wireless competition in a catchup frenzy. Reports coming from a number of vendors indicate extensive, short notice meetings that are taking place between providers and vendors and very mature decisions levels. Vendors, who had been chasing the providers for their Wimax platforms but faced an undecided response for quite some time now, are finding the new found sense-of-urgency pleasantly surprising. For them, Wateen’s advances on the Wimax front that attracted both local and international applause appears to have shook the sleeping providers from their deep slumber and procrastination.

IXP in Pakistan

PTA is soliciting proposals for Consultancy Services on the issue of establishment of local Internet Exchange Points in Pakistan.

The last date of submission of such proposal is around the end of Feb 2008. Let us hope PTA gets good consultants to get them going in the right direction and speed.

In this relation, here is an interesting presentation on IXP by Guarab Raj of SANOG and PCH fame.

Google Zeitgeist Ignores Pakistan?

Update: This has now been fixed. A bunch of thanks to Omar Ansari and Badar Khushnood for doing their bits.

Google remains the barometer for measuring what people are doing on the Internet en mass. Google’s Zeitgeist country-level breakdown page provides a useful (and often funny) view of what are Internet users doing in a given country as a whole.

Somehow, Pakistan has been removed from this page. The entry for Pakistan used to reside at:

http://www.google.com/press/intl-zeitgeist.html#pk

but is not available now. This might be a short hiccup due to some unavailable data or a permanent removal. The later, obviously, is disturbing for us in Pakistan. Heck, even Afghanistan is being considered to be included in the list.

Let us wait for some time and hope we get our trends back at the page.

PTA gears up for IX and Peering Initiative

It comes as a stress reliever to read that PTA is finally inching towards pushing the local Internet industry towards a saner state where local traffic gets cleared locally without wasting the countries foreign exchange and without costings the end users hundreds of useless milliseconds of RTT delays.

PTA has issued an RFP that seeks consultation services on the topic of local Internet exchanges and peering points. I am not sure what direct role can PTA play in private peering as it is mostly a two-party arrangement for their own respective good with little intervention required by any third party. However, the IX domain will greatly benefit from PTA exerting its role and responsibility in bringing major players on-board.

Also, the move is going to have a direct financial impact on the top-of-the-chain IP bandwidth providers like PTCL and TW who currently do not discriminate between local and transit bandwidth and make money for both types of the bandwidths alike. With IX infrastructures in place, customer IP requirements for local needs will drop down in the short term but, as a rule, IX infrastructure will promote the overall appetite of the industry for more transit bandwidth as a whole.

Let’s hope for the best.

Pakistan’s Persistent ccTLD Pains

The painful topic of .pk ccTLD vis-a-vis Pakistan and its fledging ICT boom has been discussed on this blog in the past. Right now, an active debate is taking place on the same topic at Pakistan ICT Policy Monitor list here (yahoo ID required).

The Case for an IX

This is about establishing local clearing of Internet traffic. A concept so basic to the Internet that unfortunately remains grossly neglected (or not acted upon due to misplaced fears and priorities by the parties involved).

Before you shouts the word PIE, please note that local clearing should generally have two traits

• it must happen inside the country
• avoiding (or minimizing) expensive for-ex costing international links
• at next-to-free bandwidth rates – using the SKA (sender keeps all) or cheaper local bandwidth models

Focus Karachi (2007) for example:
Three known names to average broadband/dialup users: Worldcall, Cybernet & Multinet. Despite some efforts of optimized routing, the majority of the traffic between these well-known ISPs is exchanged outside Pakistan. The first one is on Transworld (now becoming a mini PIE on its own due to a good amount of ISP customers on its network), the second is on PIE and the third on its own IPLC towards KL in Malaysia.

Short Term Problems:

• Uniform (high) Internet prices across the industry
• Unnecessary 20% to 35% for-ex spending on Int’l circuits that could be sold to the right customer at a premium
• No cheap ‘local bandwidth’ available to users
• No incentive for ‘remaining local’ to users or content publishers
• Network outages beyond Pakistan result in network outages inside Pakistan

Long Term Problems:

• No impetus for establishing local data center for Internet hosting needs (excluding vertical DS such as Banking etc)
• As more of the country embraces Internet, ’short term problems’ identified above will get magnified.
• No mirrors of popular contents – even those willing to place their contents near the Pakistani Internet users are amazed at the absence of local IDCs.
• No real development of Urdu and other regional languages contents on the Internet. BBCUrdu to remain flag bearer of Urdu on Internet!

As time passes and Internet subscription of these players increases, they will have an automatic incentive to interconnect locally between themselves on private funds driven by savings-as-profits targets. This is considered a positive development and we are all for it.

However, the absence of a neutral NAP or IX discourage non-ISPs willing to get benefit from local cheap Internet bandwidth because the bigger players might want to preserve  their respective ‘exchange-locally-charge-internationally’ status.

Neutral NAPs and IX need data centers and meet me rooms so it might sound like a catch22 at first. However it is not. With at least two to three facilities based optical fiber Internet service providers in all three major cities of Pakistan, a feed-the-goose thinking by the bigger players is the need of the day. Grow the base market and the business will grow in turn.

Karachi again: There is one TIV certified data center in Karachi now. It has a decent MeetMe Room. We have fiber providers in Karachi who can a) use it for themselves to come there at the MMR and b) offer dark core solely for this pull-them-to-IX effort to at least one of their sizable competition. And in here lies the catch. Do they have the heart big enough to do that? For towel-manufacturers head, this is a tall order.

Could someone think loudly on the same lines in Lahore? and Islamabad?

Comrades, help us all think aloud!

p.s I have nothing against towel-manufacturing industry. Just using it as a metaphor.

UIN Charges Unchanged – for now?

PTCL’s latest offers page details some new local call charges plan. Calls in the evening – apparently targeted towards female dominated domestic population – will now cost twice but will last a full hour. This is a tit-for-tat reaction to the Mobilink and Telenor’s Rs 5 an hour and Rs 4 an hour on-net plans.

The UIN charges, as mentioned in point 4 of the announcement, are to remain unchanged at Rs 2 for unlimited time. Unless there is still something cooking, at least for now, the users can relax that the multi-metered Internet calls are not here (yet!).

p.s: The classroom and the student shown in the graphics at the PTCL site bear no resemblance to either Pakistan or UAE. What happened to the principle of local relevance!

Dialup Internet Access To Cost More

Reports in the media are pointing towards a possibility that PTCL has plans to start charging for the UIN access (access to special Internet Numbers called University Internet Access Number that start with the characteristic 131 digits) from a single call for the entire call duration to a time-based pulse charging mechanism.

Shahzad Ahmad of Bytesforall.net has summed up the case at PakistanICTPolicy forum:

This is horrendous, outrageous, unethical and unacceptable. This is not ON PTCL! Government of Pakistan, you can NOT approve this evil plan. Would you like to block and limit people’s access to Internet in the country?

How could PTCL take back the affordability of non-metered calls facility for dialup Internet access? Curse of monopoly!  In a country of 160+ million people, where number of Internet users is already very low, just around 4 million and now PTCL wants to further reduce this number? This is just lust for more money and profit. This is robbery by PTCL on Internet users.

For many years now, ICTs have been one of the major focus of the Government of Pakistan. May it well be due to market dynamics, modernization drive, peculiar circumstances, the country seen some massive, though unbalanced growth in different areas of ICTs penetration in the country. Pakistan formulated its first ever IT Policy in 2000, followed by an ambitious Action Plan.

Since then, a huge investment has been made in ICT infrastructure in the country.  Special facilities like non-metered Internet calls (where only one local call will be charged for any amount of time), even for long distance from small towns were quite unique steps for providing Universal Internet Access. We still remember the days, when Dr. Ata ur Rahman, then Minister of IT would take a lot of pride in his each TV appearance, always mentioning this revolutionary step. Indeed, at that time non-metered calls contributed very positively, providing global Internet connectivity to remote cities and towns in the country. In fact, this resulted Pakistan having the most extensive Internet coverage among the countries of South Asia.

We actually never believed in this TV report breaking the news that PTCL is taking back the facility of affordable non-metered calls and now a call will be charged every 15 minutes of the connectivity time. This means that for each 24 hours of internet usage, the user will pay extra for 96 calls at the rate of approximately Rs. 2.50 per call making the bill to be around Rs. 240/- in addition to ISP charges.

Currently, a user pays about Rs. 300 per month for 24 hours unlimited dialup connection and then telephone bill costs around 35-40 calls a month. This makes the Internet connectivity very possible at reasonable cheap rate in this country, where larger population is low income.

In the changed scenario, where PTCL wants to charge more money for each dialup call, believe me students community will be the most affected. People who need 24 hours connectivity for email/Internet will suffer immensely.

Let’s join hands to raise voice to stop PTCL from its money grabbing tactics. It is so silly that a dialup connection will become much more expensive than a DSL.

Just to let you all know that Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan (ISPAK) has issued a protest call on Monday, the 24th September, 2007. They plan to talk to Pakistan Telecommunication Authority as well. If nothing happens then ISPAK plans to move Supreme Court of Pakistan.

We request all concerned civil society organizations, relevant associations, individuals and media outfits to please help stop this evil plan of PTCL to block and limit people’s access to Internet. Yes, it indeed is blocking people’s access to Internet. Lust for grabbing more money from poor people of Pakistan is actually not going to contribute any good to the overall socio-economic development of the country.

If PTCL goes ahead with its evil plan, we propose “take-back-the-net” campaign and country wide protests. We will involve all relevant associations, IT Industry, media and general public to stop this. If PTCL insists on continuing with this plan then Government of Pakistan should provide alternatives to Internet users in the country. PTCL’s monopoly is unacceptable.

Mobilink embraces data

The long on-going, almost over-due project was declared signed and closed with Alcatel-Lucent. Daily time has the full story here. This is going to be the second major countrywide Wimax project, the earlier one being deployed by Wateen and uses Motorola’s gear. The project, whose financial size or commercial availability dates has not yet been publicly disclosed, reportedly makes extensive use of the strong channel sales partners that Mobilink has developed in the rewarding cellular market of Pakistan over the past many years.

The next similarly sized announcement should come from PTCL which is still talking to a number of solution vendors in this domain. Apart from these three large scale projects, a number of other entities, some of which are in the security infrastructure of the country, are deploying Wimax technology for their respective requirements.

There are till a number of players like Telecard and Cybernet who won the 3.5 Ghz frequency in the open auctions during deregulation but are not moving ahead with their Wimax adventures for want of some business case precedence and internal priorities.

Telenor PicShare Service Review

Blogging, telecommunication and entrepreneurship are all picking up in contemporary Pakistan. In this context, let me share a quick review I did of a recently launched value added service of Telenor. Telenor has branded the service as PicShare. The service’s back-end is based on a relatively new mobile value added service company called PixSense that has some Pakistani origin.

I have the opinion that Telenor appears to be the most data savvy among the cellular companies operating in Pakistan. Picture sharing and blogging are getting popular and it made a lot of sense for Telenor to have this service and nothing better than selecting a Pakistani back-end company to deliver the results.

Here is the review of the service itself (using Telenor EGE service on a Nokia 6300):

I signed up for the service (cost = Rs 30/mo + Data Charges for image uploads) from the main Telenor website. The menus, that were not very neatly done in terms of graphics, asked for my cell phone make and model and then showed me some bleak (blue) screenshots of the phone’s menus and explained where to go and what to select.

While I was at it, I received a confirmation email from support.pixsense@telenor.com.pk that CONTAINED my password. Normally, this is not the industry practice as plain email is not safe from being snooped on the network.

The application was easy to install via the ‘get application’ button on the Telenor’s website. However, since the application requires a number of access permissions (communication for data transfer and user data for accessing photos and videos stored on the phone), a number of permissions were required to be set. The application itself was not smart to tell which of the permissions are missing so it was cumbersome to visit the complex tree of the application access menu and make sure that these permissions are in place. It took me five to six tries before I was there and every time the application just gave a simple error message ‘check permissions’. I guess putting the intelligence of ‘what permission is actually missing’ can enhance the usability of the application.

Once I fired up the application, the application asked for my telephone number and PicShare password. I guess the telephone number should have been automatically picked up by the application at least. I hoped that I do not have to go through this process every time I use the application and I was right. The next time I started the application and it was intelligent enough to remember my login details.

Once inside the application, it showed the sole snap that I had taken up today. The snap got uploaded automatically probably because I selected the option which allowed this. The background nature of upload did not allow to gauge the speed of the transfer. I guess that was fast. I was hoping that as a courtesy and display pro-privacy thinking, the application to tell me that so many applications have been uploaded to the web from my phone.

I hurried to my notebook to check out the results on the web and this is the Achilles heel of the Telenor PicShare in my opinion. Since the application is from PixSense, Telenor has sort of out-sourced this (or probably that was the only way of doing it) to PixSense. While connected to the Telenor’s website to access my recently uploaded photos, it resorted to frames with the inside frame being called off the Pixsense web servers (http://picshare.pixsense.com). Web developers have long abandoned use of frames inside the web pages for good reasons. Even on a wide-screen desktop of my notebook, I was getting horizontal scroll bars and the two vertical scroll bars (one for the main page itself, the other for the embedded frame) was cumbersome and for a while took me back to 1995 when frames were still being used.

The PicSense online interface for viewing and managing does not allow direct URLs so that the uploaded images cannot be used directly – a great disadvantage to those who blog. Since the service is ‘all about sharing’, it makes sense that this requirement should have been considered. The system does allow a ‘download’ button to download the jpeg image to your computer. I tried sharing one of the snaps and the presence of frames completely confused me about what was happening while the ’sharing’ page opened up. Once the page reappeared, it gave the option to share the stuff via email or via SMS. I shared the collection by providing it another of my email addresses. An email was received moments late that contained the shared image’s thumbnail and a URL which opened after some delay but once again, with a number of frames.

My overall experience with the service and the application can be rated at 3/5 with lots of room remaining for improvement in the application logic, user notification, privacy and the main web interface on the web.

Other interested users at TGP have noted existing competition such as Twango for this service. If you have any additional review inputs, feel free to share in the comments.

Worldcall Wireless in Karachi

Worldcall has banners up in various parts of the city announcing the availability of their wireless local loop service which was anticipated since May 2007. The advertisements say free local call, free nationwide calls (presumably on their own network), 85 paisa per minute to US/UK and 10 paisa/min for WLL based Internet. The service is running off Huawei’s equipment.

CDMA based WLL services have already seen earlier players like Telecard and PTCL and have drawn a mixed response in terms of service standard quality. The ‘free on-net’ calling phenomenon which was triggered by Telecard (and is now being followed by Worldcall too) has found some loyal subscribers. I regularly spot shop owners in various localities of the city keeping a ‘Go CDMA’ phone as part of their communication arsenal and most of the time, the end user is doing the ‘least cost routing’ – finding the service that provides the cheapest service to reach the particular end number.

However, with a very high/healthy tele-density that is regularly being cited in anything good is to be said about Pakistan and a stiff competition and friction between DSL providers, it looks like that Worldcall as a late entrant in this digital communication race in Karachi would be having a tough time at best.

Performance of the reported availability of EvDO services on this network would be worth observing. If you have a review of the service, please post it in the comments.

 

Pakistan Bandwidth Appetite

I had been meeting a lot of fellow friends in the industry in person lately for a number of reasons. One interesting number that I came out with was that of the total transit Internet bandwidth that Pakistan is currently subscribing to. Between PTCL, Transworld, Multinet (the companies) and SMW3, SMW4 and TW1 (the three cables -and a couple of transponders worth of satellite back up bandwidth) we are talking about an aggregated 2.5 Gigs of IP transit bandwidth (give and take an STM-1).

Not only the figure is respectable, the growth trend that my contacts described is excellent. Drivers for increased consumptions, as we discussed and nodded at, included new DSL services, VoIP traffics and the popularity of bandwidth hogging Internet services like Youtube.

A number of other potential bandwidth-suckers that are waiting around the corner include mass distribution alliances that are expected to talk place between bulk bandwidth suppliers mentioned above and the new distribution channels like Niyatel’s (and other similar outfits in Central Pakistan).

This trend is impressive. Additionally, it also presses the managements of the local industry to come forward and think broadly out of the box for some badly needed but missing standard industry practices like local peering and Internet Exchanges and local Data Centers. If the growth trends continue, it can soon become a major foreign exchange eater and the only way we can reign this in is through localization of traffic within Pakistan.

PTCL DSL vs ISPs

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has announced a determination that deals with the complaints of Internet Service Providers of Pakistan with respect to PTCL’s recently launched Broadband Pakistan DSL services.

The determination:

1. has approved the ring-distance based charging by PTCL for metro circuits needed by DSL operators to carry their traffic from their DSLAMs back to their respective data centers but have asked PTCL to provide an SLA for the service which would be reviewed by the regulator
2. has denied the ISPs requests to be provided Ethernet connectivity between Exchanges instead of the current non-scalable nXE1 solution available to them
3. has approved the PTCL line-rent reduction from Rs 217/mo to Rs 150/mo direction future rate changes to be routed via the authority’s approval process
4. has fallen short of asking PTCL not to counter-offer the existing subscribers of the DSL providers and has advised the parties at arriving at a agreement as to how the providers should handle the DSL churn between themselves
5. has denied the ISPs’ plea to get access to the shiny new PTCL OFAN and has concluded that only the copper infrastructure of PTCL is up for sharing.
6. has instructed PTCL to let the operators bring in their copper pair to the PTCL premises to make use of the outside copper plant of PTCL.  Currently, PTCL has highly restrictive practices of not allowing interconnection between operators with each other one or both of whom happen to be co-located at PTCL premises.

The determination is being actively discussed at TGP here.

A Newage Inspiration

We all know Internet killed geography long time ago. Just like TiVo took the live TV out from the clutches of time and Slingbox freed your TV from your living room, there is one company that thought about enabling any phone company on earth worth its name to let their ‘phone numbers’ set free anywhere on the Internet and make money along the way.

It is not always that a Pakistani origin new-age Internet company makes a wonderful product that not only proves to be a financial success but is also an excellent example of innovative thinking and visionary excellence.

Meet DIDX – DID Exchange, the star product of Super Technologies. Without exaggeration, an attempt to describe Super Technologies, its various products and its contribution to the telecommunication regulation politics in Pakistan will consume a full blog on its own. The company that 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.

So what is DIDX and what do they do?

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 and commercial gymnastics. Suzanne Bowen is the CEO of the company (and out of her interest in the Pakistani Telecommunication market which, as a by-product, has given him a partner like Rehan – she’s a lurker at TGP too!) The company has a number of developers working OUT of Pakistan. So while it would be technically wrong to call this a ‘totally Pakistani venture’ because of the mix of fine people from so many places, the strong Pakistani contents in their HR is a matter of pride for all of us back at home.

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. Most of the time, the teleco focuses on the service it is providing and tends to overlook the ‘affinity’ that those numbers carry and the possibility of that affinity being marketed and traded – anywhere on the Internet.

DIDX is the opposite of traditional call-termination market places. In these call-termination market places, participants compete to terminate your call at the cheapest of the rates possible. At DIDX, participants compete to sell their ‘DID numbers’ to those who value them because of their ‘callers’ having a certain affinity or proximity with those numbers. DIDX participants generate revenue because either the number is used from their very own network (for which they get paid anyway by the caller) or from foreign networks (which, again, pay them the termination charges). The only hidden cost of the DIDX participant here is the Internet bandwidth that is utilized for each of the call that originates as a VOIP call from their SIP box to the wild Internet and end up at the original user’s MSN, Google Talk or FWD soft phone (it could be a hard one as well).

Explained in even simpler terms, DIDX enables any telephone company to procure some cheap Internet bandwidth, host a box on that bandwidth, and start selling their telephone numbers to worldwide buyers. Since these numbers would be used by individuals seeking to ‘receive’ calls from the old telephony world to their voiped-up digital universe, there is a very high over-subscription that is possible because not everyone would be using the service all the time. Selling a million odd numbers via DIDX, for example, for $10 ea could give a juicy business figure to a lot many telecommunication companies especially outside North America.

On the other side of the eco-system, DIDX suddenly enables voip islands, like Skype and MSN a steel bridge back to the 4 billion people on earth that still are stuck in the older telephony universe. It takes little time to appreciate the impact that DID has created on VoIP worldwide.

Ever since DIDX went out in the wild, its participants are growing. While the list is long, Skype, Google putting them up as their partners and (just today), Jeff Pulver the grand daddy of voice over IP announcing the partnership of FWD with them are rock solid proofs of the brilliance of the idea and the company behind it.

So best wishes for DIDX, Rehan and Suzanne, and we hope you keep innovating the voip space!

PKNIC Stats

Continuing our discussion of PKNIC and the future of the .pk ccTLD, I was provided some interesting figures by a reader of this blog last week. Faried Nawaz says he has been grabbing a copy of PKNIC’s zone file everyday for the past ~ 6 years. On my request, he’s given a snapshot of the database for a random date (27th Jan, every year) all the way from 2001 till 2007. I’ve compiled the figures in a tabular format to highlight the growth of the various domains (hopefully reflecting the associated sector to some extent) and the entire .pk sphere. Here it is:

First impressions: To be honest, the size of the registry sort of disappointed me by at least 100%. I had always assumed there would have been at least 50,000 total domains registered under .pk. Like elsewhere on the Internet, the .com counterpart at .pk (.com.pk) is leading the herd with six digit registrations in 2007. Runner up, in 2006 and 2007, is the name.pk domain which PKNIC started in 2006.

There is also a marked growth in the overall numbers in 2006 and 2007, the years that have seen strong growth in cellular and voice services. It is plausible that there is a co-relation between increased cellular voice usage in the country and the Internet-based (or Internet aligned) businesses in the local market.

PKNIC charges Rs 2,000 per domain per annum for two years for all domains except the name.pk domains which are available at Rs 1,000 per domain per year for Pakistani customers. Government domains are not charged any fee provided they are able to demonstrate a government agency backing the registration of the domain.

A quick back of the hand calculation will give anyone an idea of the revenues that PKNIC can expect out of these numbers. Leaving that as an exercise to those interested in the dollar figure and focusing back on my initial disappointment at the smallness of the total domains figure, I would request PKNIC to reduce the domain name registration cost further, provider a local face to the single-most important Internet company of the nation, and open up more channels for easier uptake of the .pk domain name by the local businesses.

I am very confident that these ~19,000 domains do not reflect the activity of Pakistan and its business outfits truly. There has to be a tremendous amount of local businesses that have turned to the .com and .net gTLDs just because they were cheaper, or more easily available, or had reseller agents roaming in the street doing the stuff for them without much hassle. Let us work towards increasing the size of the pie and everyone should benefit from it. Just like MADE IN PAKISTAN is (supposed to be) a matter of pride for all of us, let .pk be our badge of honor in the Internet.