Tag Archive for 'Pakistan'


Call for Papers: Infrastructure Regulation: What works, Why, and How do we know?
Deadline: 05 December 2008.




Use of mobiles in the Mumbai attacks

It is always informative to engage in a retrospective assessment of the use of technology in a terrorist atrocity and see what we can do to make their activities more difficult (and prevent knee jerk reactions that only make the lives of law-abiding people more difficult). The first reports on the use of mobiles by suicide attackers of Mumbai are coming out:

Mr. Muzammil, who is the right-hand man to Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakvhi, the operational commander of the group, talked by satellite phone to the attackers from Pakistan when the gunmen were in the Taj and Oberoi hotels, the Western official said.

The attackers also used the cellphones of people they killed to call back to Mr. Muzammil somewhere in Pakistan, the official said.

One use is clear: they killed…

Pakistan ranks world’s fourth in broadband growth? (with such a tiny base!)

Pakistan is ranked fourth in terms of broadband Internet growth in the world, as the subscriber base of broadband Internet has been increasing rapidly with the total base crossing 170,000 in the country.

The rankings are released by Point Topic Global broadband analysis, a global research centre. According to the statistics, there are around 382. 4 million broadband subscribers worldwide by the end of August 2008 as compared with 317 million in August 2007, showing 17 percent growth.

Regional Broadband trend revealed that Western Europe has the largest share of broadband users with 26 percent followed by North America at 22 percent. South and East Asia regional is in the third place with 22 percent share.

In Pakistan operators are offering wide range of technologies like DSL, Cable,…

Mobile benchmarks overtaken by events

One of the main reasons for collecting and disseminating indicators data at the regional level is currency. By the time the ITU puts out its reports, two years have gone by, and the data are of historical value in these fast-changing times. Despite knowing all this, even we got tripped up this time. In attempting to release mobile and broadband benchmarks at the same time, we delayed the release of the mobile data collected and analyzed in early October and were overtaken by events. In the future, the data will be released without delay.

In early October, the relative positions of the four lowest-price countries (Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka) had changed only slightly, with India becoming slightly cheaper than Pakistan and Sri Lanka falling…

Pakistan numbers come crashing down

It appears that we were all fooled by the PTA’s data collecting and reporting practices. It now appears that the overcount of mobile SIMs may be over 10 million!

Mea culpa for having believed PTA numbers. When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

World Bank in action: Disaster Risk Management in the Information Age

“We must realize the fact that disasters threaten sustained economic growth of the society and the country.”

These were the words of Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani addressing the opening ceremony of the first National Disaster Risk Management Conference. The function, reported Associated Press of Pakistan, was organized to mark the Disaster Awareness Day observed annually after the catastrophic earthquake which struck country’s northern areas in October 2005, killing 73,000 people and leaving 3.5 million homeless.

On the other side of the border Congress President Sonia Gandhi has said there is a need of effective disaster management to mitigate the woes of the people in future calamities, with floods affecting several districts of Bihar and other parts of the country. “The people of India have contributed…

Talking contention ratios at Telecoms World South Asia

At the end of a long day at Telecoms World South Asia in Dhaka, I presented some of the preliminary results of the Broadband QoSE work being done with IIT Madras. I talked about the finding that the bottleneck in Chennai and Colombo appeared to be the international segment and that the first results from the testing done in Dhaka suggested the same applied to Bangladesh, with the ISPs using satellite (versus undersea cable) were suffering very high latencies.

The CEO of a Pakistan ISP, Mr Wahaj us Siraj, said that the situation in Pakistan was very different, with plenty of capacity available on the undersea cables and low contention ratios (1:4) being used. Prices of international capacity had come down radically in recent times,…

LIRNEasia research published in Telektronikk

An article entitled, ‘Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Beyond Universal Access’, co-authored by Harsha de Silva and Ayesha Zainudeen, has been published in Telektronikk, a leading telecommunications journal, published by Telenor, Norway.

Appearing in the journal’s second issue for 2008, aptly titled, ‘Emerging Markets in Telecommunications’, the article explores the extent to which “universal access” to telecommunications has been achieved  in Asia, based on findings from LIRNEasia’s five-country study of the use of telecommunication services at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’, namely in India, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Very high levels of access, but low levels of ownership are found. The paper then looks at the potential benefits that these non-owner users are missing out on, and then goes on to look at the key barriers to ownership…

Interview with Pakistan universal service fund CEO

Telecompk.net is carrying a multi-part interview with one of the recent and more active universal service funds in the region. Part 1 is here.

Mobile game in Sinhala and mobile myths, also in Sinhala

Last Friday, I was invited to speak at an awards ceremony for the winners of Colomba Wate, a mobile game in Sinhala.   The young entrepreneur had given up a cushy university job to start the company, Gamos Technology Solutions.   That was perhaps the main reason I agreed to speak at his event within hours of returning to Sri Lanka.

The slides that I used to illustrate my talk are here.  The basic thesis was that the mobile is now becoming more than voice, or even an Aladdin’s Lamp, to use Muhammed Yunus’ phrase.  I was followed by two speakers, Daya Rohana Athukorale and Arisen Ahubudu.

The former claimed that of the eight reknown hackers in Australia, seven were Sri Lankans.   The latter said that King Dhatusena, 5th…

GSM Asia Pacific Conference: Mobile operators beginning to see the value of evidence-based interventions

Asia Pacific telecom operators had a big party in Colombo this week. They were celebrating the 21 st anniversary of the global mobile standard, GSM. Despite a few puzzlingly sexist comments about the significance of the 21 st birthday to a “Young Girl” (as though it was not significant for a male) it was a good party.

Anyway, the point is that it was not just fun and games. The conference that followed was a serious one. In the industry leaders’ forum LIRNEasia was also given a place. I have been to many of these events, both at ITU Telecom when they used to be the preeminent industry gathering place and at other industry fora, and I have never seen anyone other than CEOs and government…

Pakistan focuses on expanding broadband services

Chairman Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) Dr. Muhammad Yaseen has said that data usage is increasing in Pakistan and proliferation of broadband services will help establish Information Society. He was talking in a seminar on The Future of Mobile Communications in Pakistan.

Chairman PTA said that for mobile phone industry future direction could be value addition and innovation in services including mobile commerce, video streaming, and high speed mobile internet.

He said presently broadband costs are high in the country but broadband usage was showing growth in the recent quarter. He said that PTA has carried out surveys to know the socio economic impact of mobile phone, which revealed that with the introduction of mobile communications productivity has increased significantly.

He said that the spectacular rise of telecom industry…

Over 500m new mobile subs in Asia’s emerging economies-report

Aug 26, 2008, telecomasia.net

Asia’s emerging markets, comprising eight nations, are expected to see mobile subscriber net gains of 573 million by end-2012, breaching the one billion mark to close the year at an estimated 1.06 billion subscribers, a report from research firm Frost & Sullivan said.

In 2007, these emerging markets were home to some 487 million mobile users, accounting for 37.1% of Asia-Pacific’s total mobile subscriber base, the report said.

The report also said the mobile services sector in eight emerging Asia-Pac countries (excluding China) earned revenues of $33.27 billion in 2007. This is predicted to reach $61.35 billion by end-2013, at a CAGR of 10.7% (2007-2013).

Growing at a CAGR of 15.1% (2007-2013), the mobile subscriber base is expected to hit 1.13 billion by end-2013 to…

Sri Lanka Pornography Regulatory Commission?

In one of the two websites it runs, Telecommunication Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL) gives its mission statement - which is cut and pasted below:

“To create the optimum conditions for the telecommunications industry in Sri Lanka by serving the public interest in terms of quality, choice and value for money; the service providers with equitable access to spectrum and other common resources; and the nation in its drive for socio-economic advancement through a skilled and ethical workforce.”

We are surprised to see pornography not mentioned – considering the latest task TRCSL has been assigned  –  blocking porno. Lankadeepa reports only about blocking pornographic movies and video clips, not images. Assumed strict enforcement, this can lead to the ban of not just YouTube but Gmail and…

Assessing the General: How did the Pakistan telecom sector do in 2002-2008?

A few days ago, we learned that Major General Shahzada Alam Malik (Retd.) had stepped down from the leadership of the Pakistan Telecom Authority. We believe that his seven-year tenure at the helm of the PTA merits an assessment. It begins thus:

Pakistan’s recent telecom developments constitute a South Asian success story. From two million in 2002, the number of active mobile SIMs increased to 79 million by end 2007. This is a compound annual growth rate of 115 per cent a year, one of the highest in the world, and the highest in South Asia for that period.

The full document is Pakistan’s telecom transformation, 2002-07

We fully realize that readers, especially from Pakistan, may have varying views on whether or not Pakistan’s telecom sector was transformed,…

Pakistan has lowest international telecom prices (in the world!) but not to SAARC neighbors

A recent LIRNEasia media outreach effort timed to coincide with the upcoming SAARC Summit in Colombo has been picked up by AFP.

Leaving aside the question of the operators in the SAARC countries collectively lowering their termination rates to make possible more reasonable intra-SAARC call charges, the data also show that Pakistan has the overall lowest international telecom prices and Nepal has the highest. Hopefully, some of these prices will come down, now that the comparisons have been made!

South Asian leaders urged to slash telco tariffs - LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE

Calls were cheapest in Pakistan, where fixed and mobile phone users pay three US cents a minute to call many non-SAARC destinations, including the United States and Hong Kong.

But users pay 12 US cents to call Bangladesh and…