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.

Last night, Pakistani clocks have been moved forward by an hour to implement the Daylight Saving Time which is aiming at reducing some of our energy costs. DST is debatable, to say the least. Look up for the topic and you will see how many arguments exists in its favor and against.

That we have an evil energy crisis at hand (which is bent upon slowing us down even when we have just started to move forward as a nation) is a fact. And fighting a crisis of 21st century with a 100 year old trick might not be the coolest thing to do.

With teledensity in Pakistan being touted as the highest in the region and Internet finding a mainstay in our dailylives, we need to look at innovations that can conserve energy for the nation. The regular options that come to mind such as telecommuting, mobile transactions and remote control of energy spending gadgets might validly be a pass-time for the advanced world. However, I believe that the power of having almost half of the nation talking to each other via cell phones should be harnessed via a social campaign to reduce our power consumption.

Why can’t we have a ring tone campaign similar to ‘go musharraf go’ such as ‘bijli bachao doostoon’ (friends, lets save electricity) and social SMS campaigns saying ‘turn one power consuming item now’? Why can’t the chain-letter-loving nation send energy conservation messages to each other to raise the awareness on this critical issue. The connected Pakistan is a large, influential audience which, if it acts in harmony, can make big changes happen.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has released a ‘consultation paper‘ on its website for public comments. Those who might be short on time to formally comment on the paper can use the comment space here and I will try to incorporate the inputs in my response.

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.

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.

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.