May 16th, 2005
Another fibre-optic link between India and Pakistan will be setup in the upcoming months running from Lahore, Pakistan to Amritsar, India. The Ministry of IT & Telecom is delegating PTCL to prepare a feasibility report due next month, with another six month following to lay out the network. The agreement could have evolved from an earlier news event reporting India-Pakistan coast guard link-up.
Pakistan’s current (and only international) backbone runs through India via the SeaMeWe-3 undersea fibre-optic cable. The new connection should provide some bandwidth relief. Is there any other route Pakistan can take to create an independent uplink?
Posted in Government, Internet, Telecom | 2 Comments »
May 15th, 2005
On Friday, 13th of May, a fire at Information Technology Infrastructure’s Karachi Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE) office caused disruption to the city’s Internet connectivity. According to ITI’s helpdesk a fire started at the I.I.Chundrigar exchange was responsible for severing last mile connections to various ISPs and businesses who depend on PIE for their net connectivity. The fire started at 4pm and it took ITI’s personnel about 8 hours to restore connections one-at-a-time to effected customers.
Customers of PIE include ISPs, Data Network Operators (DNOPS), DSL Service providers, software exporters, call centers, educational institutes and corporate businesses.
This is not the first time PTCL’s PIE network has faced problems with reliablity. Tee Emm’s (slightly old) blog provides excellent background on PIE and reliability issues it faced sometime in 2003.
Posted in Internet | 6 Comments »
May 13th, 2005
Warid is to launch operations in 28 cities today. They have a current initial capacity to support 1.5 million people.
Warid has signed agreements with five companies: Nokia (to supply cellphones), Huawei (optical transmission network), Chimera (after sales services), Frontier Works (local expertise and laying out of 5000km Optical Fibre cable) and Ericsson (GSM/GPRS + core radio and network equipment).
Frontier Works Organization is an army-run company (often charged with monopolizing government contracts) and proposed the clifton underpass in a record 4 months, but the proposal puts the company to shame (they should have hired some civil engineers).
More interestingly though, their GM Sales & Marketing is Naveed Saeed. This is his NAB profile:
Name: Naveed Saeed
Occupation: Inspector Punjab Police
Allegation: Corruption and corrupt practices through known sources of income.
Court Decision: The Court has finally accepted the application u/s 9 (c) of NAO 1999 and closed the case against Naveed Saeed.
NAB Name: Lahore
Ref Date: 1/19/2005
Ref No: 1/C/2005
What does an inspector know about marketing a multi-million dollar telecom company? I didn’t bother googling the rest of the team.
Telenor is responding by offering free in-network MMS and cross network SMS (reported to have some problems). We previously covered Mobile Number Portability which should set the stage for competition.
Posted in Telecom | 3 Comments »
May 12th, 2005
The BBC reports:
Pakistan’s first women fighter pilots
The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) academy has been all-male for more than 55 years - but now it is going through major change. Women are now allowed to enroll on its aerospace engineering and fighter pilot programmers and are doing rather well.
When the current batch passes out in a year these cadets will become the first-ever women fighter pilots in Pakistan’s history.
Diversity is the key to progress. Participation of women in technology arenas has always been very low in Pakistan. What other technology related areas are Pakistani women having an impact on?
[ed] Malaysia is another Muslim country that has female airforce pilots.
Posted in Defense, Gender | Comments Off
May 11th, 2005
Dawn reports:
Bill Gates Foundation pledges $6.5 million to support health, education efforts LONDON May 11 (APP).
The Bill Gates Foundation pledged US$ 6.5 million to Pakistan Human
Development Fund (PHDF) for supporting its health care and school education programmes in neglected districts of the country. State Minister and Chairman for National Commission for Human Development, Dr.Nasim Ashraf, announced the contribution while speaking at a dinner hosted by the patrons and trustees of the Pakistan Human Development Fund UK Chapter on Tuesday.(Posted @ 17:50 PST)
Posted in Academia | 2 Comments »
May 11th, 2005
An interesting news item at Daily Times reports Pakistan has 10.54 million mobile phone users as of Apr 30, 2005. This is almost double the number of fixed telephone lines in the country and also explains the recent move by PTCL to offer free phone setup (previous story).
PTCL’s Executive VP, Mashkoor Hussain’s comments also explain the move by PTCL (which has a monopoly on fixed lines) to offer free connections:
“We have over 5 million subscribers in the country, We achieved this during the last 50 years but now we have a target to give two million more connections till December 2005.”
Other intersting market metrics from the article: the annual mobile phone market is growing at a staggering 120% anually. At present Mobilink leads the market share with 6.45 million subscribers, followed by Ufone with 2.2 million, Instaphone with 524,852 and Paktel with 308,629 subscribers. Norwegian company Telenor has attracted 653,170 customers in just two months.
Posted in Telecom | 5 Comments »
May 11th, 2005
News sources have revealed that Pakistan will start joint-production of a light weight fighter aircraft with China in the first quarter of 2007. The JF-17 (also here) aircraft is based on the Russian MIG-21. It was designed and prototyped in China at an estimated cost of US$150 million, half of which has been funded by Pakistan. According to the agreement, full production should start at PAC Kamra in 2007 upon initial delivery of 8 aircrafts from China. The project will not only help in upgrading Pakistan’s aging aircraft fleet, but more importantly ‘it will help train the nation’s engineers and mechanics in the art of aircraft making’.
Posted in Defense, Government | 7 Comments »
May 9th, 2005
PTCL’s ‘Bilkul Muft scheme’:
Under this scheme people would get new telephone connection by making a call at PTCL UAN number 111900900 if technically feasible the PTCL representative will visit the subscribers’ residence and after filing of new telephone connection form, the connection would be provided at subscriber’s residence.
Anyone called that number?
Additionally, they have also reduced the phone tariffs to Rs 3.50 per minute between any two cities in Pakistan. Last month they posted a profits of RS 21 billion. In parallel, PTCL plans to privatize 26% of their operations and is one of the heavy-weight tickers keeping the market bullish. Quite agressive.
Is the PTCL copper-wire infrastucture running through the city really worth that much? Maybe it’s the backbone that holds all this promise or maybe they are simply trying to set themselves up for high bids from foreign investors.
Posted in Telecom | 5 Comments »
May 8th, 2005
Business Recorder is running a story about a private company in Islamabad that wants to introduce broadband over powerlines. According to the article, DZD Communication’s (no link available) CEO said that operations could start as early as the next three months and that connections would initially be given to multi-story buildings, though negotiations with WAPDA have yet to be wrapped up.
Posted in Internet | 4 Comments »
May 5th, 2005
As part of the e-government vision, the government of Pakistan is seeking Korea’s assistance with e-procurement. Currently a feasibility study is proposed for 3 months. The key upside to e-procurement is transparency, competitiveness and managerial efficiency. The World Bank has an interesting report on Korea’s e-procurement model (PDF Format. HTML format here) . From the report: staffing requirements fell from 1058 to 935, procurements increased by one-third to $17.1bn. The e-procurement system managed $20bn in goods and services between Sep 2002 and Sep 2003 with the participation of 25,000 public agencies and 87,000 companies. The four factors from Korea’s experience: strong leadership, nationwide e-government reforms, information and communications infrastructure and comprehensive process reengineering. The toughest of those for Pakistan might be process reengineering. Korea began it’s e-government reforms under President Dae Jung Kim (1998-2002).
This is somewhat contradictory to our previous story: Pakistan ranked second last among ‘e-ready’ nations.
Posted in Government, IT | 1 Comment »