Internet-based Services

What brick-and-mortar based services come to your mind that can be readily offered over the Internet for a local customer base that do not have access to or willingness for using credit card/paypal for payment? (Note: This is different from Internet services such as web-development, hosting etc).

A good, creative answer to the above question can give you a very interesting idea for starting up a small business of your own which efficiently utilizes cheap Internet access available to most middle-class households today in urban Pakistan and the ability to accept payments via Easypaisa from Telenor.

The flip side of the equation is that there aren’t many EP account holders as of today and the fact that the full-year transaction limit is only Rs 120,000 which is just too small.

But the best starts are almost always humble.

The ‘voice’ of Internet

ISPAK – or anything similar – is badly needed today for fixing the current content-meddling activities of PTA. 

Unfortunately, with the demise of conventional ISPs and the rise of voice-driven telcos as the new-age ISPs, somewhere in between, we left out the platform that could address ‘Internet industry issues’ as its prime focus. 

Today, we have functional LDI industry groups (and the celluar voice probably doesn’t need any grouping as there are too few players to have communication problems) but we are short of an Internet industry group. 

The ISPAK of yesteryears first rose from Karachi with Cybernet a major financial and moral driver and active participation from others and a parallel version blossomed in North and both delivered tremendous value and achieved major milestones. The Internet user had a very distinct voice in the name of this (these?) bodies. However, today the platform probably lacks the participation, the passion and the investment that it deserves (barring a few souls that had been delivering consistently without any break such as Wahaj sb et al). 

As Internet and broadband penetration increases in Pakistan in the coming days (hopefully!), we will move from a connectivity hunger to full-functionality hunger. And the issues will get more complex. The only way of addressing this is to encourage and urge the players to invest time and money in an industry platform that can potentially address these challenges lurking around the corner. I make a passionate appeal to all who have anything to do Internet to come forward and increase their participation in ISPAK and make it the voice of the ordinary Internet user.

Offline Gmail – Made for Pakistan

Part of the magic that the search company has been able to cast on the human race has to do with its very deep strategic thinking bit. Email, at least a few years (months?) ago, had been the killer application on the Internet. Google targetted web based email services segment with the fast and efficient Gmail service and ever since than, they had been busy making it more and more useful by adding features that would let people just glued to the application.

Google Gears, the component that lets websites operate more like desktop applications, has now been tweaked to serve Gmail in ‘offline’ modes. Yes, out there they mean offline when traveling by air or in the train but for us here in Pakistan (and I guess the entire region), connectivity can never be taken for granted. Hence, the newly introduced Offline Gmail (still in the labs) has a lot more application instances than just traveling and this has more to do with the next billion people who are, or will soon be, about to go online on patchy and flip-flop networks worldwide. 

In the backdrop of the addiction to online documents and Gmail (now with the powers of enduring the outages caused by ‘traveling’ in the west or by KESC/Wapda here at home)  Google’s Chrome, with its built in support for Goolge Gears  (you don’t need a plugin for that in Chrome) and sepearately processed tabs is gently holding us by the arms and taking us from Deskabad to Cloudpur. And before we realize, the desktop (as we know it) would go the dodo’s way.

E, bay, pay, tay, say, jeem

 

No, I am not dead. Yet.

I am reproducing Faisal Khan‘s recent open letter to eBay for the lack of paypal services in Pakistan below to show solidarity with the cause (thanks for the tip Jehan Ara). And I think it is more of a perseption (of the country) problem than anything else. Let us hope to have the services available in Pakistan soon. To eBay: We promise, we won’t mishebave and that all Pakisani usage innovations we will do with the service would be copyleft! 🙂

January 11, 2009

John Donahoe
President and CEO
eBay Inc.
2145 Hamilton Avenue
San Jose, CA 95125
USA

Subject: PayPal for Pakistan

Dear Mr. Donahoe,

I understand you are someone who is immensely busy and have thousands of other important issues to deal with, but I thought I’d try my luck with you. I’ve been writing to PayPal / eBay since 2002 regarding issuance of PayPal accounts for Pakistan, in 2005 I started including eBay in my correspondences to include eBay accounts for Pakistan.

I have never received a reply back. Twice in the past, I received a reply back (filed via customer services) that my ‘complaint’ has been lodged and PayPal will look into it. Other than that, have not gotten a satisfactory reply.

The issue – simple. Why is eBay / PayPal not being offered for Pakistan?

I just finished reading an article on your hand-on approach in TIME Magazine (Issue 12 January 2009 – Asian Edition, Page 35, written by Kristina Dell), it simply compelled me to get on the computer and write another letter to eBay / PayPal. The article gave me hope (again!)

Pakistan – purely from your business perspective may not be that big of an economy, but it surely has an economy that is larger and more active than Bhutan, Chad, Honduras, Somalia, Maldives, Rwanda, Uganda, Yemen —combined!

If these countries can have the privilege of obtaining a PayPal account, why not Pakistan?

As Pakistanis cannot legally have a PayPal account, 1000s of users here circumvent the system and obtain PayPal IDs from their friends and relatives abroad to use and conduct commerce. This should be of no surprise to you.

The same can be said about eBay.

Like I cited, we may not be that big on your radar, perhaps we’re not even equated to a blip, but a country of 170 Million, to be blatantly ignored (you may agree or disagree on my choice of words, if the above mentioned countries can have PayPal, I’d like to know what piece of legislation, law, banking infrastructure, etc. prevents eBay/PayPal from including Pakistan under your countries-in-which-you-work umbrella).

Pakistan’s predominant trading Partner happens to be the US. Within respect to both imports and exports (discounting oil).

The first time I experienced eBay and PayPal in the summer of 2001 whilst briefly working in the US – I was mesmerized to say the least. Till date, I wish we had the privilege of conducting business on a website so many take for granted.

This is not meant to be a protest letter by any means. In fact it is one of a very humble request. A request whose time has come, and was long overdue. I have in the past cited my willingness to help, providing information or getting eBay / PayPal connected to Banks, regulators, whomsoever you would like to meet. I am, in no way proposing or advocating a ‘role’ for myself – my intention is just to help.

Is it too much to think that perhaps this one letter will get the ball rolling. Or if the ball is already rolling, yield the desired result. Will this letter be tacked on your things-to-do board and actually get done with? Is this the right time to plead the case for my country?

I’ll end my letter with a quote from Dale Carnegie (sorry, couldn’t find a befitting Irish quote) “Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”

I just want to be able to have an eBay and a PayPal account from Pakistan. In the event you want to reach me, the easiest way is via email, my personal email address is babushka99@gmail.com and official email address is faisal@nacspl.com
Regards,

FAISAL KHAN
CEO
Net Access Communication Systems (Private) Limited
Karachi, Pakistan.

CC: Mr. Scott Thompson, President, PayPal.

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!

India to allow Internet Telephony

Update: Here is the pdf version of the press release issued by TRAI on this subject.Thanks to Wasim at TGP.

Very much related to my previous post, an interesting news from India is coming – possible opening up up Internet Telephony as a service. Pakistani regulators should give Internet telephony a pro-consumer thought and, for the umpteenth time, not follow but lead India in pro-consumer policy making.

According to an email from Frederick Noronha posted on Pakistan ICT Policy mailing list by Jehan Ara:

TRAI allows Internet telephony; STD tariffs may drop

New Delhi (PTI): Telecom users will soon be able make calls from their personal computers with Internet connection to a land line or a mobile phone and vice versa, if a TRAI recommendation in this regard finds acceptance with the government.
The suggestion by the telcom regulator, if accepted, will further boost competition in the domestic long distance segment and may lead to fall in STD tariff.

“It is envisaged that customers will ultimately benefit from cost effective and innovative Internet telephony service. These recommendations will put Indian telecom sector in tune with global trends. The grey market tendencies shall be curtailed,” TRAI said in a statement.

As per the TRAI recommendations, the STD service providers would be connected to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) through public Internet for the purpose and the two service providers would have mutual agreement for the same.

The move will permit calls from personal computers to fixed line and mobile phones. At present, a voice call can travel between two computers but not from a mobile or a fixed phone. This is expected to open channels of huge revenues for ISPs.

The Telecom Engineering Centre (TEC), a technical arm of Department of Telecom, will work out the number plan for the ISPs to enable them to offer telephone services.

“Telephone numbers from identified blocks shall be allocated to ISPs,Unified Access Service Providers, Basic Service Providers and Cellular Mobile Service Providers for internet telephony,” TRAI said.

With a view to make Internet telephony secure, TRAI said, all ISPs interested to provide unrestricted Internet telephony would install” Lawful Interception” equipment.

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.

DST in an Internet Age

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 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’.

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.

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.

PTA’s Consultation Paper on NGN

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 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.