PKNIC Outage

PKNIC, the entity responsible for the global top level domain of Pakistan (.pk), is reportedly down for the past 8 hours. This is the latest in the series of now very ‘old pains’ that have now become synonymous with the domain controlling body.

While this do not have any immediate affect on the globally operating domains under the .pk ccTLD for now (due to the way the DNS system works), users trying to reach the site for updating their domain records or paying for their domains will be facing problems.

It is most likely that the problems would be resolved and we will see the site back soon.

However, once again, this incident points towards the weakness of PKNIC as a user-focused entity. Despite being run as a commercial operation, PKNIC has not been able to fulfill the basic need of communicating with their paying users such as providing them with a representative office or officer one can reach, a helpline one can dial, a blog that keeps its users informed about the latest with the entity and so on.

This lack of communication has been shedding a very bad light to its name. Unless PKNIC addresses the basic need of communicating with its paying users in ways that are a norm of today, it would only be normal and logical for the general public to view every move of PKNIC with doubts.

In an age where dozens, if not hundreds, of offshore companies having their ‘touchable’ operations going on in Pakistan, there is no reason why PKNIC which holds the linchpin of the Pakistani cyberspace can’t have a reachable and touchable representation in Pakistan.

I sincerely believe that this will help PKNIC and its users.

Prepaid Voucher Alert

An acquaintance of mine who runs a shop in a busy, middle-class business district and sells a host of telecommunication services (PCO, pre-paid cards for cellular, WLL and Internet services) told me how he was robbed of a few thousand rupees recently by someone who bought a good number of Rs 300 prepaid cellular service vouchers from him only to return the same within 30 minutes for some compelling reason.

This friend of mine trusted the guy and gave him the money back. Later in the day, when some other customers bought those cards, it was revealed that the cards were already consumed up and my friend ended up loosing his hard earned money.

Apparently this means that some sort of reading means have been discovered by the ever creative community of ours (of course the creativity seems to work in the negative direction) which can read the codes of concealed voucher codes. It seems intelligent now either not to purchase any high value pre-paid cards or limit the purchases from a place where you have some affinity.

An obvious second choice now seems to be the balance transfer facility (affectionately called ‘easyload’) from the cell phone shops mushroomed in every corner of the city. However, as reported earlier, there are problems with these easyload shopping that includes profiles of women who come for getting the balance loaded in their cell phones being ’sold’ to the degenerated, mastee-obsessed ‘youth’ by these easyload shop keepers. Talk about ‘value added services’.

TeleCON 2008

Global TeleCON 2008 was held in Karachi on 29th and 30th April 2008 at Sheraton Hotel, Karachi. The conference was organized by Shamrock Conferences and was sponsored by the cellular and other telecommunication companies. It was a two days event with a dinner and cultural evening at the end of Day 1. Here are my personal observations of the event and round up of the presentations and talks I attended.

Disclaimer: My employer was the one of the main sponsors of the event. I was able to attend Day 1 of the event only and missed the Day 2. Views expressed here are my own and not of my employer.

My experience for Day 1 was mixed. Some presentations were really good and thought provoking like the one given by Dr Amir Mateen of Cisco Systems Pakistan where he talked about how great the broadband vacuum is in Pakistan and how unprepared the local contents are and that in the absence of structured local contents, people will make up their own contents (read social networks) and in doing so, there is a real danger of a whole new generation getting carried away in the roman Urdu flood and how this threatens the Urdu script and the associated heritage.

Sajjad Haider, Director Networks, Ericsson’s presentation later in the day was also great where he detailed case studies in which operators’ business cases that were negative turned positive due to better power management in terms of turning off RF carriers during low-traffic hours, turning to solar energy etc. In the backdrop of the current energy crisis, it made an absolutely interesting listening.

Mr. Mudassir Hussain, Director Telecommunication Wireless, MoITT’s presentation was a demonstration of HATR - Human Assisted Text Readout technology.

Presentations by both Mr. Zouhair A. Khaliq, President & CEO, Mobilink and Mr. Hasnat Masood, Director Corp. Communications, Telenor were disappointing. At least from Zouhair sb, I was expecting a ‘talk’ instead of a corporate brochure readout. Babar has hit the bull’s eye when he wondered if these were self-promotion activities. When an event is named as ‘Congress’, it makes all sense to put aside the bragging and talk about technology, trends and issues. You get your subtle publicity for your company anyway but why poison your neutral views with the unnecessary logo banging? Telenor presentation was done on a black background with dark blue colored fonts which were unreadable to the audience and required the presenter to read it out for them.

Presentation by Mr Adnan Asdar of Multinet was probably not very well delivered due to it getting fast-forwarded / short time but it talked about the whole telecoms infrastructure industry of Pakistan and it openly showed achievements and landmarks of all of its competitors. It was nice to see images of competitors landmarks, maps with due credits provided appear on the screen.

My favorite presentation of the day was by Mr. Furqan Qureshi, General Manager, Wateen Telecom . Though it was not immune from the ’self promotion’ virus that was making rounds that day in the ‘congress’, he was probably the best presenter in terms of delivering the contents to the audience and knowing what was going on his slides when. He talked about how Wateen is going to Mars to reach their customers and how ‘every morning the CEO and nine of his close associates go thru the emails and telephone calls’ to fix customer issues. He also announced that Wateen has ’stopped charging’ for the full year in advance for its wireless broadband services which are now available on a discounted rate.

The young Mr. Syed Abid Ali, Consultant PTA, Six Sigma gave an intro (with the mandatory Motorolla details!) about the 6 sigma hoopla and its application (and interestingly where not to apply it). He was neutral and that was pretty relieving. During the question break, it was fun to see someone mischievously ask Abid about why Moto is failing these days if it was so good with the six sigma?

Mr. Noel Kirkaldy, Reg. Director, Wireless Broadband (ME&A) had an eye-candy presentation and the usual well-delivered presentation (what else do you expect from someone like him). He was smart when he repeatedly played on the theme of Pakistan being the first in the entire world to take up a country-wide Wimax roll-out. He declared LTE as an evolution and Wimax as a revolution much to the subtle nay head moving of Sajjad Haider of Ericsson whose presentation was about how LTE is more likely to fix the economics of future networks.

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.

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.

Telecard’s New Venture Attracts $17m

The News is reporting that Telecard has finalized a new venture focused on Value Added Services for which an International Consortium (members of which remain unnamed) will be investing around $17 million for a majority stake in the new venture. For a quick recap of recent mergers and acquisitions in the Pakistani Telecom market: Etisalat bought majority minority (Thanks Ashar) stakes in PTCL in 2005 for $2.6B, Singtel recently bought 30% of Warid Telecom for $758 million, Omantel bought Worldcall’s majority stakes for $156 million, and Qtel bought 75% of Burraq for $12.3 million. Full story is here.

Linux Competency Center in Pindi

IBM has set up a Linux Competency Center in the NIIT’s Rawalpindi Campus with lots and lots of support gear.

…As part of establishing the center, IBM has donated its range of enterprise systems (including pSeries Unix Servers, Intel Processor-based xSeries and BladeCenter servers, TotalStorage), Printers, PCs, CISCO equipment - all of the hardware running on Linux SuSE deployed by IBM Global Technology Services team. IBM will also provide free hardware and software services for the first year. In addition, IBM Middleware software will be used by NIIT in their curriculum for graduate and undergraduate students under IBM Academic Initiative program….

Pakistan-India Fiber Linkup

There are more news about the Pakistan-India fiber linkup via the Wagah border (Lahore/Amritsar). Essentially, the project is inching, not leaping, further. As we discussed back in early 2006, India is said to be reluctant about the equality of the utility of the optical fiber. From the The News story:

It’s not a big issue, but it has to be resolved first before it gets operational,’ said a source close to the development. ‘There are more bottlenecks on the Indian side compared with Pakistan, as India believes the project would benefit Pakistan more.’

An optical fiber link is also being established between Pakistan and Iran.

Ufone Follows Mobilink - Launches Voice Portal

Following Mobilink’s recent launch of a voice portal (covered here) titled ‘Mobilink World’, by-lined ‘Sab Batata Hai’, Ufone has also launched a voice portal. This one is titled ‘Utalk’ and by-lined as ‘bool kay suno’ is accessed by dialing 777. The IVR assisted voice portal has songs, jokes, recipes etc but as noted earlier, voice portals in Pakistan, like most of the other places, are still short of being a real voice-driven search platform which could be of immense relevance to the local population.

Telecom Sector Estimates

Pakistan Uncut has a review of the latest installment of PTA Quarterly Report on Telecommunication Sector in Pakistan here.

VSAT Hubs Mushroom

Pak Datacom is announcing that they are installing an iDirect VSAT hub.

Insufficient fiber and other wired infrastructure, limited range of existing terrestrial wireless technologies and a boom in ICT industry in Pakistan is causing an upsurge in the satellite services.

Banks and other financial institutions are one of the major drivers for remote area data connectivity market. New initiatives by the Government to introduce electronic management in its working is the often considered as the second largest factor driving the satellite services consumption in Pakistan.

Modern VSAT hubs are intelligent entities that make better use of the expensive and scarce satellite bandwidth resources by intelligently distributing the same to a large number of customers that are equipped with smart satellite terminals - costs of which is coming down as third-party CPEs made to a number of standards are getting cheaper. Installation cost and complexity for the remote sites is also coming down allowing better confidence towards the service by the end customer.

Lately, a number of network service providers have installed VSAT Hubs to service the growing data services sector. Supernet (iDirect), Comstar, Pak Datacom (wing of PTCL) and Multinet all have either installed or are in the process of installing VSAT hubs to complement their existing wired and wireless services.

The explosive growth of cellular services in Pakistan has resulted in the companies’ new quest to reach the untapped rural markets and in the absence of optical fiber backhaul, VSAT backhaul have picked up big times. Mobilink, Ufone and Telenor all have placed huge orders of VSAT backhuals for their base stations in far flung areas such as FATA and Azad Jammu Kashmir. The volume of the business has taken the otherwise go-slow network service providers by surprise and in certain cases, single orders placed by the cellular giants have been comparable with the annual volume of business done by the network service provider.

50 paisas only!

“The market will dive down to the ‘50 paisas per minute, anywhere in Pakistan’ level - in five years. ” These were the ‘prophetic’ words that were ‘very in’ two years ago when two additional licenses were given to Warid and Telenor in Pakistan. Telecom executives would announced this to each other. Little did they know that they are only half correct. The 50 paisa per minute anywhere would come but that would not take the whole five years!

The competition in the Pakistani cellular sector is fueling the price war like never before. Although the ‘aath anay’ (old local term for half a rupee) milestone is still not here, the prices have come down to a point where the marketeers of the services can bring in the 50 paisa mention in their sales pitches with fine prints telling us that this is for 30 seconds, on-net and/or for close user groups of friends and families.

CMPak (previously known as Paktel) announced their new package plans which flashes the 50 paisas rate.

CMPak Limited - formerly Paktel and China Mobile’s first venture outside China ñhas introduced a new tariff package named “Power Package”, said a statement on Monday.

It said the package offered its subscribers 50paisas per 30 seconds (on net) the lowest call rates in the market - from 7 pm to 10 pm. Moreover a customer can enjoy three (on-net) friends and family numbers for the same rate throughout the day, it added.

Lower rates, while a welcome news to the subscribers, would also mean that operators would have to be vigilant on their spendings and accurate in their planning and execution.  This would also mean that the operators would have to pay attention to value added services and other revenue enhancers.

CMPak’s Investements - Insomania for Mobilink?

AFP is carrying a report that mentions CMPak’s resolve to invest another $500 million in its Pakistan operations. Rural penetration is being cited as one of the main components of the expansion thrust:

World’s biggest telecom operator China mobile having 320 million subscribers in China plans to invest another $ 500 million next year as the investment atmosphere is very conducive here. Executive Director China Mobile Pakistan Sikandar Naqvi Thursday told CNBC channel that a sum of $ 1.2 billion has already been invested in Pakistan.

This, read along with the statement from the China Mobile Chairman that China Mobile sees their Pakistan operations as a valuable experience for its subsequent international ventures, will surely put the existing big boys of cellular services in Pakistan like Mobilink and Ufone on high-alert and may be give them sleepless nights.

Pakistan Post Plans Paper Email Service

Pakistan Post is reportedly facing a 20% volume decrease every year. This could directly be attributed to the penetration of modern communication means such as cellular telephony and Internet.  The state owned organization is now planning a new service that would allow users to send messages to their loved ones in remote areas using a website of Pakistan Post. The message will than be sent via Pakistan Post’s traditional network of paper mail to these areas.

India launched this service (called ePost) 4 years ago.  So much for innovative thinking.

CMPak Selects Alcatel-Lucent for Life After Paktel

Alcatel-Lucent is announcing that China Mobile Pakistan (CMPak) has selected the company for provisioning of GSM/GPRS/EDGE equipment for the expansion of the CMPak services in the populous north of the country (Pakistan).

Summary: According to the details, Alcatel-Lucent (through its Chinese presence of Alcatel Shanghai Bell) will provide its high density GSM solution which is needed for higher density urban cities of Pakistan. Alcatel-Lucent is also providing PDH and SDH equipment for the transmission requirements of the new expansion project. Apart from hardware, the  company is also providing network optimization, support and general project management.

Telecard Joins Stake Sellers’ Group

The News has this story on Telecard considering selling some of its stake to a foreign group:

The country’s pioneer and the largest payphone companies are in talks with foreign groups to sell off its share, what the industry believes is an attempt to attract investment for expansion.

TeleCard - one of few payphone companies in the country has planned to sell out its minority shares to one of the foreign business groups, it is in talks to and is expected to reach deal in the days to come.

“Actually the company has initiated talks with a UAE group and there are several other intentional players, which it eyes to engage in,” said a source privy to the company officials.“Though the company has not reached any conclusion with any group, it is expected to review offer of the different groups it has received.”

He said the company had almost decided total percentage of the company shares to be sold off but it had not yet disclosed the details. However, he said, the company officials believe it took more than anticipated time to strike deal for the desired sell off.

The country has witnessed a series of foreign takeovers in recent months as two foreign groups have already acquired majority stakes in local companies. First Qatar Telecom stretched its wings to Pakistan, entering into final talks to acquire Burraq Telecom with nationwide and intentional telephony networks at $30 million.

Then it was Egyptian Orascom Telecom - parent company of the largest cellular operator Mobilink - that finalised deal with DVCOM, a licensed LDI (long distance and international) and limited mobility telecom operator.

However, source said the TeleCard was more interested in selling out minority shares keeping management control in hand with majority stakes.“It’s a little early to suggest percentage planned to sell out but it would obviously be minority shares as the company wants to keep management control intact,” added the source.

He said the company had plans to expand its fixed line network across the country for which it looked for investment against shares sell off.“Currently TeleCard operates payphone and WLL (wireless local loop) services with also an ISP (Internet service provider in place,” he added.

He said TeleCard was ready to evolve as the most technological advanced integrated telecom solution provider of the country. “The company has successfully launched WLL service (GO CDMA) based on CDMA2000 1 X technology that provides the unique combination of voice and data/internet for the first time in Pakistan,” he added.

The country telecom sector has fast attracted foreign during last three years with main focus on cellular service. However, industry players believe it’s a high time for reputed intentional telecom operators to capitalise on opportunity in Pakistan, which offers one of the best business opportunities in its rural areas.

The country’s telecom sector has attracted $1.41 billion foreign direct investment during the first nine months of 2006-07, retaining top position among all other sectors. Figures released by the Federal Bureau of Statistics suggest foreign investment in the telecom jumped 34 per cent during July-March 2007.

Weird Stats

A news item in Daily Times says that Pakistan imported cellular phones worth around $728,000 in the last nine month which according to the news article is 28% more than what we imported last year during the same period.

Umm..sounds strange. The reported figures are not even close to a million dollars. Either the report used the figures of just one vendor or it really got confused with the facts. With an average cost of $100 (Rs 6,000), this figure means that we imported just around 7,280 mobiles? Quite unlikely.

With the average joe Teefa on the street buying a new cellular phone worth $60 ~ $100, no local production of cellular terminals, PTA complaining about insufficient record keeping of SIM issuance and millions of users being added to the networks month by month, even with tax and paperwork evasion, the figures must at least be in tens of millions of dollars.

More Details on PTCL IPTV Plans

More details are emerging on the new broadband infrastructure that PTCL has been working on.  Daily Times says in a report that the project cost for the Optical Fiber Access Network was $58 million (Rs 3.5 billion) and that PTCL plans to offer triple play services on the new infrastructure with as many as 250 IPTV channels, voice lines and faster Internet access all for Rs 1,500 ($25) per month. [Let us hope they put all this together before stuff like Joost takes away most of the juice out of regular TV and channels!]

The network will continue to be build beyond the three key cities of Karachi, Lahore and Islambad:

PTCL plans to expand the service in phases across the country. During the first phase, the company will provide the service in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. The required network will be installed across the country within a year. Two Chinese companies have installed more than 350 ONUs from exchanges to telephone cabinets by replacing old copper cables with optic fibres. One optic network unit costs Rs 10 million.

PTCL’s new management apparently knows it is easy to put the nuts and bolts together but difficult to build up customers’ confidence in their service attitude that is very badly tarnished due to the people in its ranks that are used to of decades of monopolistic environment. Let’s hope they put together a better support team they are currently seeking people for.

Provided the network is properly rolled out in time (with adequate customer support backing the higher speeds it promises), it will open up opportunities of more BPO businesses by existing or new SMB outfits and other virtual transactions.

A key challenge that PTCL will face in the roll out of this network would be provisioning of real IPv4 addresses to its envisaged 100,000 always-on customers. Since this would require close to the equivalent of 400 class C blocks and given the shortage of IPv4 addresses worldwide, it is most probable that PTCL will resort to network address translation (NAT) and put its customers behind fewer real IPv4 addresses. While browsing and download speeds will increase with the new network, a lot of fun would go away because of the absence of real IPv4 addresses. It would be logical to expect that there would be an exception to this for the ‘gold plan’ customers on the network. It would also be good to see PTCL experimenting with IPv6 deployment along side this network roll out though shortage of applications for IPv6 will remain a tough challenge to surpass.

Omantel: Me too!

Omantel is reportedly also interested in buying stakes in a yet unnamed telecoms company in Pakistan.

‘The company is currently studying plans to enter into competition to purchase a share in a Pakistani telecom company,’ Omantel said in a statement. ‘The deal … would give Omantel an opportunity to expand its investments’. Gulf Arab telecom operators have been hunting for foreign assets as competition increases at home, and Asia has been a priority.

Qtel to Invest $80m in Pakistan

Arabian Business is reporting that Qtel will invest $80 million in the next few years via Burraq Telecom that it acquired (75% stakes) in April for $12.3 million. The fundings is expected to bring wimax based Internet to the major cities of Pakistan.