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.