Telecoms, internet in Pakistan

I have been using Warid for the past few weeks. I bought the connection from a franchisee. Franchise staff were good and effecient.

The connection worked as soon as I gave them my NIC card and the quality is consistently good. Coverage is excellent. Mobilink has just installed a tower on the roof of the next building but reception quality is still not good. Warid is much better.

Customer support is also excellent. Whereas Mobilink is impossible to contact on the phone and my visits to Mobilink offices have always been unpleasant, Warid telecom is very easy to contact. The call center people are obviously under a lot of pressure but I have always been connected to a real person almost immediately. That person has been very helpful and effecient.
I needed to make international calls and Warid wants a total of at least Rs5000/- as deposit. Now this is a bit old fashioned since international rates are so low, but that is life. As setting this up takes upto 2 days I called Warid to ask that they expedite this. I got a call back within a few hours saying that they has set up my account to be able to make international calls. No way would PTCL or Mobilink call me as a courtesy.
The only problem I have had was setting up a GPRS connection on my new phone. The phone was not a common one and so the Warid system was not able to set it up automatically. The Franchisee spent almost an hour with me but no result. On my second call to the Warid call center the person on the line didn’t know how to set up my GPRS but promised to email me.
The email arrived the next morning and my internet connection was on.
Competent. Effecient. Human.

GPRS was slow, incredibly slow, but at least it worked when all else had failed. I was able to answer a few very important emails using the phone. I can tell you that it was tedious but since SMW3 was down and I had no access to any other ISP I was very happy.

So far I am very happy with Warid. Hope that they can keep it up.

SMW3 is apparently up and running again. Let the battle for this months bandwidth charges begin. I for one will not be paying for the 10 days of lost connectivity. Call centers are going for a full months of ‘mufta’ and that is cool!