M. Somasekhar’s piece on Hindu Business Line on mobile payments says:

Experts from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Kenya, Thailand, the Philippines, Bhutan and Bangladesh among other nations met in Islamabad recently to discuss their experiences in providing mobile phone services for the BoP segment in their respective countries. They agreed that a beginning has been made and the road ahead appeared daunting, but technological progress promised quick results.

Don Sambandaraksa’s  piece “Mobile phones offer hope to ‘bottom of the pyramid” to Bangkok Post focuses on mobile use in farming, transport and banking. Says he:

“ICTs cannot solve all problems, chief of which is land reform, but when it comes to making decisions, lowering transaction costs and going to market and selling, information can make a big difference.

The researched categorised the decision-making process and information value in each from decisions to seed, planting, growing to harvesting and selling.

Information search costs are highest at the beginning of the cycle. Information on deciding what to grow are three times all other costs, and this is where ICTs have a potential role to play.

Sriganesh Lokanathan said that ideally he wanted to change the decision-making chain into a cycle where the decision on what the farmer wants to grow is based on the price when he expects to harvest. For this to happen, prices and supply and demand needed to be predicted and farmers need to get into forward sales contracts which does not often happen in this part of the world.”

Meanwhile we see Pakistan Telecom Authority, the co-organiser takes the message forward. ‘PTA Focuses on Value-Added Services Including E-Commerce, E-Agriculture & E-Education’ was the title of a report from Pakistan Telecom News Bulletin. It says:

Chairman, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) Dr. Mohammed Yaseen has said that PTA’s focus is on value added services and with a high penetration level of mobile and low penetration of internet we have to explore the available possibilities which could be gained via mobile 2.0 theories. I very much foresee the further development of presently available technologies and those coming ahead through value added services and content. He was addressing to Connect 2010 ICT Forum – Telecom Session at Expo Centre Karachi and talking to media men on the occasion. He said that our emphasis is on e-commerce, e-agriculture and e-education, it is the time to open doors of opportunities to our young innovative minds and to bridge the unseen gaps between all potentials players of ICT proliferation.

For the full media coverage and presentations,  please see here.

Interestingly, while in India, a telecom operator has to contribute 5 per cent of its annual revenue to the USO Funds, Pakistan charges much less at 1.5 per cent. In India, the funds go to the national budget and the Department of Telecommunications has to make projects to source them, in Pakistan a separate company has been created to utilise the funds.

The journalist also points to a new twist whereby renewable energy has been made mandatory for all base stations supported by the Fund.

In a bold move, the Pakistan Telecom Authority, the telecom Regulator has made it mandatory that all bases stations being set up with support from the USF should be ‘Green Sites’ or renewable energy powered, especially solar and wind as the case may be. The reason being that there is currently, a huge shortage of electricity in rural Pakistan.

One hopes India will take what is good from the experience of others, even Pakistan.

How was the telecom market affected? In the same report, a figure shows how the subscriber base increased over time. However, the rate of growth declined in recent quarters. In 2007, the rate of growth was 9.9 percent; 2008 ended with a minus 0.3 percent growth. The average revenue per user went from USD 3.1 in the last quarter of 2007 to USD 2.58 during the last quarter of 2008.

Similarly in Sri Lanka, government has seen the mobile industry as an easy source of revenue through taxes and levies. There may be lessons for Sri Lanka from the counter-productive outcomes of Pakistan’s efforts to milk the golden mobile goose.

LIRNEasia’s T@BOP3 study conducted in 6 Asian countries indicated that only 38 percent of households at the bottom of the pyramid in Pakistan have access to mobile phones. There are consumers waiting to adopt mobile phones. Shouldn’t the government make efforts to make them available to them? Getting more people connected and taking a reasonable share of their payments as tax would be more productive than imposing taxes that bar them from becoming customers and deprive the government of tax revenues.

The PTA is to be applauded for doing these kinds of analyses. One hopes that the government of Pakistan will take remedial action to get telecom growth back on track. One hopes that other regulatory agencies will conduct and publish similar studies.

“One innovative approach adopted recently in the
Asian market is to try to quantify the extent of
sector reform. LIRNEAsia has conducted research
into the regulatory environment in six Asian economies
(India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri
Lanka and Thailand). Their research is based on
interviews rating performance in market entry,
scarce resources, interconnection, prices, anticompetitive
practices and universal service. Their
evaluation of the regulatory environment is in general
agreement with sector performance, as measured
by the DOI. However, the fit is not perfect: for
instance, Sri Lanka actually gained two places in
the DOI, but it lagged behind, ranked fourth out
of the six countries in regulatory performance.11
This suggests lags in relating changes in the regulatory
environment to sector performance.”

We appreciate the care with which the report has been written, emphasizing in the reference that it is still a work in progress:

“Work to evaluate the Telecommunication Regulatory Environment by LIRNEAsia is ongoing. For interim results, see
the presentation by Rohan Samarajiva et al (March 2007) at: www.lirneasia.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/telecom-regulatory-environment-rohan-samarajiva.pdf. For ongoing work on refining the methodology, see: www.lirneasia.net/2007/03/colloquium-on-refining-tre-methodology/. ”

The most current version of the TRE results was presented at the Pakistan Telecom Authority workshop in Islamabad, July 15, 2007.  The final paper will be presented at the 35th Telecom Policy Research Conference in Virginia, USA, September 30, 2007 and will be available online prior to that.

Pakistan exceeds in Telecom Regulatory Environment – PakTribune

Chairman PTA said that PTA had provided level playing field in different areas of tele use in the country.

He appreciated the research activities in communication sector as they motivated to perform even better. The total tele density reached 43.44 % in May 2007 as compared to 12 % in June 2005 while approximately 2.3 million subscribers were being added on cellular mobile networks each month in Pakistan, he observed.

Shahzada Malik also observed that total mobile subscribers at the end of May 2007 crossed 60.8 million marks.

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Following opening remarks by Chairman of PTA, Major General (R) Shahzada Alam Malik, Samarajiva and Wilson presented the new improved version of the six-country Telecom Regulatory Environment study, with emphasis on Pakistan.

de Silva discussed the results of the Teleuse @ the Bottom of the Pyramid (T@BOP) survey conducted in five countries, including Pakistan. Among other things, he discussed the disparate access to ICTs between men and women at the BOP as well as the tremendous progress made in connecting large numbers of people at the BOP in the past few years.

Iqbal presented comparative analysis of mobile prices in three countries of South Asia, using a basket methodology adapted from one used by the OECD since 1995. With these comparisons, she illustrated that Pakistan has the lowest prices for SMS and also for low-users.

From the Daily Times, Pakistan. 15 June 2007

Presentation slides:
Telecom Regulatory Environment 2006 | Rohan Samarajiva & Joseph Wilson
Teleuse@BOP: Pakistan in Asian Context | Harsha de Silva
Basket methodology to benchmark telecom prices in South Asia: The cases of Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka | Tahani Iqbal
News Releases:
TRE:Telecom Regulatory Environment (TRE) 2006 survey results: Pakistan among the leaders in Telecom Regulatory Environment, a regional study reveals
Teleuse@BOP: Pakistan BOP doing well overall in telecom, but large gender divide still exists
Price comparisons: Pakistan low-user mobile baskets cheaper than in India and Sri Lanka; SMS charge is lowest in South Asia and lower even than in the Philippines

Media coverage
pakcoverage14jun07_1.pdf
pakcoverage14jun07_2.pdf