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.

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.

Food is the new Oil

In a world where oil is the new gold and food is the new oil, Shaikh Nahyan of Abu Dhabi group who has recently received the ‘Largest foreign investor of Pakistan’ award from the privatization ministry of Pakistan is now eying the agriculture sector of Pakistan. Here is what he had to say about opportunity in the agriculture sector in Pakistan.

Addressing the forum, Shaikh Nahyan said agriculture is crucial to Pakistan’s economic prosperity. “Investment opportunities in agriculture sector are attractive. I encourage all potential investors to take a long-term view of Pakistan’s economy as one of the emerging markets of the world — a market where astute investors should want to establish and sustain a long-term presence.”

p.s: My grocery store bill just nodded in agreement with the Shaikh when the price of a 5 kg rice bag took a straight jump of Rs 100 from Rs 375 to Rs 475.

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.

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).

Quality of Local Tech Reporting

The quality of the technology related journalism in the local press has been questionable for obvious reasons. Having a number of good friends in many local media outfits, I can say with confidence that none of them have any dedicated technology reporters or journalists. This excludes those who actually work for technology magazines like Spider and Netmag. This lack of technology reporters results in reports that are poor at best and grossly incorrect at worst.

Consider, for example, this news item in today’s The News International. The report starts off with an incorrect title - calling MNP a PTCL issue rather than a PTA issue. That is not all, the report actually presents the scenario as if the MNP thing was some wire that suddenly got snapped and ‘has failed’. Using the words fail or failed repeatedly, the reports gives an impression as if the failure has been officially concluded by someone and that the feature is about to be taken back.

Quite misleading if you see how some of the companies are actively using MNP to their advantage.

A better reporting would have shed lights on both success and problems of MNP and would have talked about as to how the unawareness amongst the subscribers and incorrect or unavailable subscriber documentation are major problems in wide adoption of MNP.

The Annoyance Spread

PTCL has quietly enabled a voice mail service on high revenue land line customers without seeking their consent. It is a clear bid to make revenue on unsuccessful (due to no answer or busy state) calls. This has widely been reported across the press and in the local telecom blogosphere. The process of disabling the answering service has also been published at various forums.

But this is all we already know. However, as we recover from the long Eid and 18th October tragedy and business gets back in full swing, the annoyance is now starting to show its real spread.

Most businesses get a telephone bill more than Rs 1,400 a month - the minimum amount arbitrarily set by PTCL to have the answering service enabled. Most of the business phone lines are often busy and have lots of customers call to these places all the time. With the ‘annoyance’ in place, each time someone calls the number, he hears a useless voice mail prompt (which, interestingly, is useless in a multi-user environment - voice mail services are always personal services) and gets charged for.

With millions of ‘engaged calls’ now turning into ‘matured calls’ (for the purpose of billing), this is proving to be a unique/ugliest idea (depending on which side of the fence you are) that plays on the muscles of PTCL’s might and the helplessness of the consumers.

PakistanTelecom & Economy Indicators

Amir Rajput has posted an interesting analysis of the ‘Telecommunication Indicators’ recently published by PTA. The figures (economic_growth.pdf) in the analysis conclude that most of the economic growth being recorded in Pakistan is attributed to the Telecom sector.

More Subs than ‘02 voters!

Pakistan now has 70 million mobile subscribers . This is more than the 67 million registered voters (population above 18 years of age) as of the 2002 general elections (see page 7 of the statistics report [pdf] of the ECP). This, at least in theory, means that the 2007 elections, if held as scheduled, will see every voter carrying a cellular phone.

It seems logical that just this factor can have a significant impact on Pakistan’s politics - at least in terms of the urban votes. So why does carrying a phone by every voter mean anything to our politics? Consider this:

• People are now talking to each other more than ever - between newer and remotest of the places.
• The (presumably young and literate) population sent over a billion text messages (just on the Eid day alone) a lot of it containing political contents and opinions
• Politics is coming of the TV age to enter the world of cellular activism - remember the heat the lawyers community was able to generate with their campaign recently?

Pakistan’s political scene remains ridden with question marks but what is certain that an urban population more aware than ever will be affected by the deep cellular penetration and text messaging. The next elections will have effects of this ‘connected population’ for sure. The smarter of the political lot will take their battle to this new front for the upcoming polls.

PTCL Plagiarism

PTCL recently launched a new dial-up Internet service called Phone n Net that will allow direct access to Internet from any PTCL land line telephone connection with the billing to take place along with the monthly bill of PTCL. The service, which made smaller ISPs go obviously nervous, was apparently rushed out before Eid holidays. PTCL, it seems, just felt lazy and copy pasted part of the technical contents from the website of competition World Online (WOL). [See snap shot of the PTCL with its pants down on the right.] Here are the original WOL FAQs. [Credits: Shaheer picked this up and mentioned it in one of his posts at TGP.]

Earlier, Rizwan, a visitor of this blog, commented that this picture at the PTCL website is also copied from an ad in the UK. We are not sure but then there is no reason to rule this out either. Fellow KMB blogger Zainab had recently done a piece on plagiarism in the Pakistani blogosphere but it seems that the practice is just too common in our homeland. And more disturbing than the prevalence of the practice is the lack of any shame associated with this.

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.

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.

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.

PKNIC is talking!

Haris Shamsi who represents among various other entities, Pakistan IPv6 Task Force, reported the proceedings of a recent PTA meeting in Islamabad that discussed a rather extensive 9 point agenda that included exciting stuff like putting up an IX, introduction of IPv6 in Paksitan etc. ‘Bringing back’ PKNIC to Pakistan (a topic we have earlier discussed here and here) topped the agenda list.

PTA had been receiving complaints about PKNIC from various of its customers and of recent, the regulatory body has reportedly made contacts with PKNIC management (that happens to be outside Pakistan) in what is being described as ‘a thick regulatory tone’. Interestingly, PKNIC does not come under any existing service definition of PTA and being a company established outside Pakistan, is immune to any serious regulatory influence. This is despite the fact that the body (PKNIC) is responsible for managing the digital linchpin of Pakistani business and digital citizen life, the domain names that end with a .pk.

Hearing from those who were part of the meeting, it appears that there is a thrust towards ‘bringing it back’ to Pakistan. Without proper thoughts and debates around the subject, such a thrust would be highly ‘misplaced’ and is bound to create more problems than it aims to solve. Also, probably for the first time, PKNIC ’sent’ two representatives, one of which was a lawyer named Barrister Omer to a PTA initiated meeting.

PKNIC and Pakistan is a sweet & sour story. Very (very) briefly, here is some background:

First the good things about these people: PKNIC’s early owners (it has reportedly changed a couple of hands, I am short on this data) put Pakistan on the TLD early on way before lots and lots of other countries were on the net. They have managed the whole thing without any serious, sustained outage for the .pk TLD as a whole. I can’t remember that in the past 11 years at least I have seen a major ‘not there’ issue with them. However, stories of customers getting high-rates, bad support and 100% irrelevant ‘collateral damage’ outages on their business production sites are abound. They have no real office in Pakistan, no staff (the Barrister mentioned by Haris deserve a photograph on flickr so the millions of PKNIC customers can, for the first time, put a face to the name of the company that is responsible for their digital identity linchpin). The processes and policies at PKNIC were initially closed door but later went through a corporate whitewash to include a number of stakeholders. Domain disputes and hijacking were the most dreaded aspects of life of a PKNIC customer due to various reasons. PKNIC continued to offer free .gov.pk domains to GOP requirements where, reportedly, the only requirement was a letter (not an email!) sent to them on the official letter head of the government agency and the domain get registered and activated. Electronic payments at PKNIC (something we take for granted while dealing with something as ‘nety’ as domain registration) arrived quite late .

Brining PKNIC back to Pakistan is logical and desirable. But how and when? What would the rules be? What is the collective track-record of Pakistan (regulatory and industry combined) in terms of Internet Governance? Are we ready to face an ‘Network Solutions/ICANN’ and post ICANN issues in a Pakistani light?

Some people (including this scribe) are of the view that PKNIC’s obscure and non-customer-friendly thorns aside, the consistency of the service might have heavy attribution to the fact that the body was being managed outside Pakistan in a rather ‘private’ matter. Of course this is highly debatable and views and proves are welcome.

My strictly personal views are that PKNIC is doing a good job and unless we are 100% sure that we can snatch the responsibility from them and run it on our own without making a joke of our digitalselves, we should not proceed in the direction of a total ownership change. My own suggestion in this regard is to let PKNIC continue the operations but bring them under some regulation net. Let there be some customer service benchmarks set for them, pricing would be next and so would be the issue of physical presence of the DNS server inside (and their backups outside) Pakistan.

Network Admins of Pakistan will be discussing this topic among the technical ranks to arrive at some recommendations which will subsequently be presented to the people in Islamabad.

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.

Warid Intends To Sell Part of Equity

Reuters is reporting that Warid is talking to a number parties to sell a minority stakes. The company, it says, is not ready to give up control or change the brand. Along with MTC (which we reported earlier here and here), the report cites the names of Singtel and Vodafone of UK as the parties that are talking to Warid on the issue.

Paktel’s Continued Transformation

Cellular News is reporting that Paktel’s stakes were acquired by China Mobile Communication Corporation which is the parent company of China Mobile. China Mobile is a listed company and the move is intended as the investors were cautious on the profitability of the venture in Pakistan due to fierce market competition.

Insiders are reporting that the new company, now renamed as CMPak has started a fresh wave of hiring employees.  The company is also engaged in talks with a long-haul optical network with Malaysian roots to acquire dark fiber pair on long term lease for its nationwide traffic requirement.

Sans Wateen, MTC-Warid Deal Nears Closure

The MTC-Warid deal we discussed earlier, is reported to ‘near closure’. A high ranking ex-employee of Warid with close insiders contacts confirmed the rumors floating in the market since the morning. The interesting twist is the fact that the would-be owners are only interested in Warid and have shown no interest in Wateen, the data and telecommunication infrastructure wing of the Abu Dhabi group.

Wateen is deploying Wimax services in major cities of Pakistan on a Motorola platform, has laid thousands of kilometers of optical fiber across Pakistan and is building a large number of carrier hotels to serve, besides Warid, other telecommunication entities in Pakistan that have traditionally suffered from the monopoly of PTCL for these services.