Bridging the digital divide between the provinces and regions of Pakistan

Pakistan is the world's sixth most populous country. It is also one which features regularly in TV news broadcasts that remind us of the country's strategic importance - as a state armed with nuclear weapons; as a country whose long history of troubled relations with neighbouring India took a new turn after the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008; as a country with a porous border with troubled Afghanistan.

The country, however, has not featured very heavily here at DevelopingTelecomsWatch - before today, just five of the our first 100 stories even mention Pakistan. Today's short essay will, I hope, go some way towards making up for that glaring omission.

That I was able to round up a few interesting recent stories from the country is due mainly to my knowing of a very useful blog/news site - TelecomPK.net, set up and maintained by Babar Bhatti, a a senior IT professional now based in Dallas, Texas. Most of the news items, articles and reports referenced here today came to my attention via Babar's site and his tweets.

One item I found interesting was written by Babar himself, and concerns how the takeup of mobile telephony in Pakistan has been very uneven across the country's different provinces and regions. Mobile penetration in Pakistan currently stands at 54.11%, according to the World Cellular Information Service from Informa Telecoms & Media. Babar cites figures from the country's telecoms regulatory agency, which indicate a wide variety of cellular penetration rates in the four provinces:

• Sindh - 64.28%
• Punjab - 59.35%
• North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) - 35.37%
• Balochistan - 25.01%

Sindh, in the southeast of the country, is a major centre of diversified economic activity - heavy industry, finance and agriculture. The second best performer in terms of mobile penetration, Punjab, is the county's most populous region and its most industrialised. The two other provinces, where mobile penetration is well below the 50% mark, are places whose share of the national economy is much smaller.

Babar writes Balochistan's low cellular penetration rate is most likely attributable to the province having few urban areas and, as a result, high costs for the roll out of telecoms infrastructure. He feels, however, that recent Universal Service Fund (USF) projects may improve the situation in the provinces. I assume these include the three contracts recently signed by the USF and the country's incumbent fixed line and broadband provider Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd (PTCL), as reported on 3rd July by TeleGeography. These include arrangements to bring fibre-optic connectivity to all tehsils (administrative divisions) in southern Balochistan, involving the installation of 1166km of fibre-optic cable in the region.

Much of Pakistan's population is denied access to the range and quality of vital services taken for granted in highly developed countries. Two obvious examples are the provision of health care and education services. Canada-based technology journalist Jerry Blackwell, a regulator contributor to Wi-Fi Planet, wrote an interesting article earlier this month about how communications technology is making an impact with regard to the first of these.

Blackwell's article quotes Phil Cruver, President of KZO Education, an American company that develops content and technology for online interactive learning, who points out that "the literacy rate in Pakistan is only about 50%, and for girls, it’s lower. The country has about 1.3 million teachers now, but it needs double that number in order to meet the standards [in education] that are needed."

The article is part of a series which examines the state of the worldwide WiMAX industry in 2009. According to Phil Cruver, WiMAX will be "absolutely critical" in ongoing efforts to pull Pakistan's public education system up by the bootstraps. Cruver's plan is to deliver interactive streaming video-based learning over WiMAX networks and KZO has already launched pilot projects in Islamabad. This has involved connecting two schools to a WiMAX network operated by Wateen Telecom, a provider of telephony, broadband and multimedia services that is part of the Abu Dhabi Group, which also owns Pakistani mobile operator Warid Telecom.

Comments about technical issues and allegedly poor service for Wateen Telecom WiMAX customers were aired by Chris Cork, a British social worker settled in Pakistan, in September last year. Writing in Pakistani newspaper the News, Cork provided a personal history of the frustrations of getting a reliable Internet connection in the country during his time working there. This concludes with a none-too-complimentary account of dealing with a company whose "name begins with a 'W' and ends with 'n'" when he asked for an externally-mounted receiver to get full benefit of their service.

One Pakistani blogger, writing in December, also reported that the Wateen Telecom WiMAX service, the first such offering for consumers in the country, was facing bad press and suffering reliability problems. That writer's feeling seemed to be that this created opportunities for the providers of two other WiMAX-based services. One of these is Infinity from Orascom Telecom-owned mobile operator Mobilink, the market leader in the cellular space with an estimated market share of 29.74% according to WCIS. The other is wi-tribe Pakistan, part of an international collection of wireless broadband operations owned jointly by Qatari incumbent telco QTel and Saudi firm A.A. Tukri Group of Companies (ATCO). According to TeleGeography, wi-tribe Pakistan began commercial operations earlier this month.

Gerry Blackwell writes that according to the WiMAX Forum, at least two other operators, including Supernet (owned by Telecard, a fixed wireless operator known for its CDMA service) and Burraq Telecom, also plan to launch WiMAX services in Pakistan. The Supernet/Telecard offering, however, may be in doubt if nothing has changed since Babar Bhatti wrote in March about a dispute between wi-tribe and Augere, a European company that was planning to offer WiMAX services in Pakistan via the acquisition of spectrum in the 3.5Ghz band from Telecard.

Although some have raised concerns about Wateen Telecom's WiMAX service, Blackwell reports that Phil Cruver of KZO Education has no complaints: "It was so quick to get service," says Cruver. "We paid for it, and it was up and running within 24 hours."

Blackwell writes that when KZO first got involved in Pakistan, WiMAX wasn't on its radar. "To be very honest, we didn't know there was a WiMAX," Cruver says. "It's just serendipity that Pakistan has the first nationwide WiMAX network."

Cruver's last comment might not be accurate. Gerry Blackwell writes that Pakistan is really just "on its way to having a nationwide network", with service is only available in major population centers, and coverage spotty outside city centres.

As discussed, the second area of vital services in which WiMAX could potentially make a very valuable contribution in Pakistan (and other developing countries) is healthcare.

Earlier this year, Monica Paolini of Senza Fili Consulting (from whom I once sought advice about the agenda content for a Fixed-Mobile Convergence themed conference I hosted in Miami many moons ago) wrote a paper on the theme of expanding the reach of healthcare in developing nations with WiMAX. Sponsored by Intel and Cisco, this paper notes that today, in developing nations, patients have to travel to their nearest clinics or hospitals to receive even basic treatment and to more distant institutions for specialised or emergency care. Monica argues that this model does not provide comprehensive and efficient access to healthcare and suggests that reliable, always-on broadband wireless connectivity makes a new healthcare model possible -medical professionals reaching out to patients where they live and when they need care, bringing access to a range of medical resources through voice, data and video applications.

In her paper, Monica discusses an example from Pakistan - a Cisco trial combining satellite and WiMAX connectivity to mobile units that provide early oncological screening for patients in rural areas.

Overall, Monica uses her paper to make a case for why WiMAX stands out as an ideal technology to support telemedicine initiatives. Rather than focus on the capabilities of the technology, however, I'd like to consider the business models needed to make such initiatives a success.

Monica quotes Debra Sloane, Global Healthcare Solutions Partner Manager at Cisco, who says that "extensive cooperation among public agencies, health care providers and [telecoms] operators is necessary for the creation of new business models that can address the specific
needs of communities."

Just as we have noted that WiMAX networks in Pakistan are currently confined to urban centres, Monica notes that wireless networks tend to be initially deployed in high population-density areas and suburban business districts where the highest-paying subscribers can be found. Monica argues, therefore, that governments, health care agencies, and NGOs need to work together with network operators to ensure that operators see a business opportunity in under-served urban and rural areas. Perhaps Pakistan's Universal Service Fund could be used to intervene in this way. As far as I can tell, however, the USF's activties do not yet include any such initiative.

To conclude, while it seems that a number of worthy initiatives are improving the currently uneven access to telecoms and Internet services and to other vital services, Pakistan continues to be notable for a marked digital divide between its various regions.

Bridging the digital divide between the provinces and regions of Pakistan

Views from MWC: WiMAX to gain traction in emerging markets?

I recently discussed here the relative merits of and prospects for 3.5G mobile and WiMAX networks in India. A number of news items emanating from this week's Mobile World Congress prompt me to widen the discussion out to the question of how much traction WiMAX backers can expect the technology to gain in emerging markets worldwide.

The first of these items comes courtesy of the telecoms.com, whose correspondent caught up with Wei Yuan, Senior Director of Global Marketing for ZTE in Barcelona. "We anticipate a boom in WiMAX take-up for fixed applications in emerging markets this year," says Wei Yuan, who believes that Russia, the CIS, the Middle East and Africa hold out the best prospects for WiMAX growth for the Chinese telecommunications equipment and network solutions firm.

In terms of serving mobile operators, Wei Yuan believes the '4G' market share will be 80/20 in LTE's favour, but feels that the WiMAX opportunity is still a sizeable one, especially in light of recent announcements by Alcatel-Lucent and troubled Nortel that they are no longer focusing on WiMAX mobility. The article adds weight to this last point, noting that ZTE's WiMAX momentum is highlighted by In-Stat, a market research firm whose recent report states that out of the 94 new WiMAX 16e commercial networks deployed last year, ZTE had 15 of them or 16% of all the networks established worldwide. This apparently sets the Chinese company among the top two WiMAX equipment vendors in 2008. According to the telecoms.com article, the report goes on to say that with ZTE's industry-proven WiMAX terminal solutions and a significant number of commercial WiMAX networks the company is planning to install in the years to come, "there is a high probability that the company can assume the number one spot as WiMAX equipment vendor worldwide."

Just before the Congress, Sean Maloney, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer of Intel provided an update on recent WiMAX developments, a summary of which you can read at WiMAX.com. "WiMAX is a global story," said Maloney. "The technology is real, here today and has a 2-3 year advantage over other competing technologies."

What stood out for me was Maloney insisting that big deployments in the most highly developed markets are only part of the WiMAX picture. "Too much focus has been placed on developments in the US and Clearwire," said Maloney. "This is a global story; to understand how it is doing you must take a global perspective. From the very beginning, we wanted to have a global, ultra-fast, low-cost wireless internet solution that would help bridge the digital divide and last mile."

Maloney flagged up some of the more notable deployments, including Scartel and Comstar launching services in Russia with up to 10Mbs performance. For Intel, Moscow and St. Petersburg have leapfrogged 3G services to 4G. In the case of the Russian capital, I wonder how damaging this will be for the country's three leading mobile operators MTS, Vimplecom and MegaFon, which have all rolled out 3G services in major cities except Moscow. There have been long delays with the the Russian military freeing up UMTS frequencies and I have discussed here in previous posts the argument that this frustrating 3G launch delay in the country's most lucrative market has created a window of opportunity for the likes of Scartel and Comstar. In the case of the latter, however, it is worth mentioning that the Comstar-UTS group, a leading provider of integrated telecommunication solutions in Moscow and other cities, is controlled by Sistema, which is also the parent company of mobile market leader MTS.

Scartel, says the WiMAX.com article, plans services in over 40 Russian cities and launched the world's first GSM/WiMAX phone with HTC. This has not remained the sole GSM/WiMAX device on the market for very long. WiMAX.com reported on Tuesday this week that Quantum Telecom had unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in its first Ultra Low Cost GSM-WiMAX handset. I assume this is aimed primarily at emerging markets.

Other emerging markets and middle income countries which have seen WiMAX deployments include:

• Pakistan, where Wateen Telecom has launched the largest WiMAX network in the world covering 26 cities with plans to grow to over 70 cities; mobile operator Mobilink also launched WiMAX services in August 2008.
• Venezuela, where MobileMax has deployed WiMAX in Caracas in June 2008 with up to 20K users
• Brazil, where Embratel, part of Telmex, is operating a WiMAX network covering over 20 cities

It will be interesting to see which emerging markets are home to further WiMAX deployments. I know less about developments in Africa and SE Asia, but Intel and ZTE certainly seem to be vocal, powerful backers of WiMAX as a useful option for service providers in developing countries.

Views from MWC: WiMAX to gain traction in emerging markets?