Telecoms, internet in Pakistan

March 27
When the Indian cricket team was threatened with a follow-on, a Denial of service attack “originating from India’s Bangalore software technology park hit the Pakistan Internet Exchange around 4 p.m.”.

The attack lasted for more than an hour, but no one noticed as we were all watching the match on TV.

Friday 25 March 2005
Once again Pakistan was cut off from the rest of the world, and indeed itself. Apparently the power supply to a section of the Fibre Optic link to FLAGs link was severed during construction work by some factory owner in Gulbai, Karachi.
Of course since most ISPs are just resellers of bandwidth and not ‘real’ ISPs we were cutoff even from those few websites hosted in Pakistan (no peering, why not??).

There were problems reported as early as 1pm though ISPAK says that the it lost connectivity at 3pm. Problems persisted until 8pm.

PTCL launches its ‘V’ , wireless prepaid phone system in Karachi. It has been tested for several months in some smaller towns.

IT is CDMA 2000 based, which seems to be overkill. Since PTCL already has a mobile phone company in ‘U Phone’, it is difficult to make out a case for such an expensive technology.

The offer is Rs2999/- for a connection and a set.

Callpoints is next up with a low rate package for Calling Cards . It matches DVcom’s BIGtime in that long distance is Rs2.50 per minute and calls to the USA are Rs4.99 per minute.

Although not directly related to Pakistan, this Vodaphone sponsored research is quite interesting.

The main points of interest are:
[1] Mobile telephony has a positive and significant impact on economic growth, and this impact may be twice as large in developing countries as in developed countries;

[2] A developing country which has an average of 10 more mobile phones per 100 population between 1996 and 2003 had 0.59 percent higher GDP growth than an otherwise identical country;

[3] Fixed and mobile communications networks, in addition to the openness of the economy, the level of GDP and other infrastructure, are positively linked with Foreign Direct Investment into Africa and the impact of mobile telecommunications has grown in recent years.

The full report is available in PDF format and is available here:
http://www.vodafone.com/assets/files/en/AIMP_17032005.pdf