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In accordance with the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), regulation on Protection from Spam, Unsolicited, Fraudulent and Obnoxious Communication Regulations, Zong has come up with its Number Blocking Service.

Earlier we had call block service from Ufone and Telenor, but Zong’s Number Blocking Service has for the first time enabled call and SMS blocking together in Pakistan. You can block all unwanted calls and SMS that are being sent to your phone with the help of this service and obtain peace of mind.

Through this service a subscriber can:

• block any particular number from allowing to make a call to their number
• block any particular number from allowing to send a SMS to their number
• have the option of blocking a total of 50 numbers

Subscription and Charges

Subscriber will just have to dial in to 9211 to subscribe to Call and SMS blocking service simultaneously.
Service charges for calling to 9211 — As per Package Plan.
Subscription charges for the Call and SMS Block service — Rs. 15.00 / month + tax.

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PTCL senior management, controlled by UAE based Etisalat, has been playing a careful game with its employees and union workers since privatisation. It has gone through voluntary separations, change in policies, lay offs etc. Recently there were protest by PTCL employee union and PTCL responded to that by providing some carrots to the employees, which were covered in a press conference. In the press conference senior HR executives talked about profitability of PTCL, pay increase, foreign nationals working for PTCL and the relationship with union workers. The News reports:

PTCL’s Senior Executive Vice President of Human Resource Syed Mazhar Hussain said that foreign nationals working for the improvement of the PTCL are from the UAE, Sri Lanka and the Sudan. However, some of them belonged to Pakistan as they were working with Etisalat for last several years, he added. He was accompanied by Executive Vice President of Communication and Corporate Ali Qadir Gilani.

Answering a query, he said that the Board of Directors of PTCL approved 20 per cent raise in the basic salary for grade 1 to 16 employees while 15 per cent raise was granted to officers. He said that the PTCL also granted bonus with minimum provision of Rs7,500 before Eid in order to give relief to employees.

When he was asked about delays in paying installments by the Etisalat in shape of privatization of the PTCL to the government of Pakistan, he said that this question should be asked by the Privatization Commission, and PTCL management had nothing to say anything on this issue.

Answering a query about reduced profits of the PTCL after privatization, he said that although the profits reduced, but the market analysis showed that the call rate stood at Rs48 per minute from Lahore to Karachi which now nosedived to 60 paisas, resulting into scaling down of profits.

But he claimed that the profit earned by the PTCL was much more than the collective earning of 60 to 70 players of the telecom sector, including the cellular companies.

He clarified that the PTCL management did not strike any deal with the protesting employees as they were trying to get “political mileage” for the upcoming referendum, which is going to take place after Eidul Fitr.

He said that the PTCL management had taken decision not to bow down before any effort to get blackmailed from any anyone. To another query, he said the PTCL gave its consent in the court for granting bail to those who were arrested by the police when these protestors tried to block network operation system as well as data centre where the bill software was installed.

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Wired.com has a great article on how products which are good enough are winning consumers. In “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine”, Robert Capps provides examples of flip video camera, mp3 and Skype. Entire markets have been transformed by products that trade power or fidelity for low price, flexibility, and convenience, says Erin Biba, a wired correspondent. For developing countries, it makes all the more sense as the buying power of consumers is low and they will gladly make that trade-off.

I am a big fan of the 80/20 rule. One of the big value which you get this way is the speed. In a way this less is more thinking is also a part of the ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’.

I leave you with a few extracts from the article.

Net-based calls can be laggy, and they sometimes drop out in mid conversation. But they can also be free—even international calls—and it’s easy to turn conversations into shareable MP3s. Skype now accounts for 8 percent of international calling minutes, and the service added nearly 38 million users in the second quarter of 2009, a 42 percent increase over the same period last year.

On paper, netbooks might seem like crappy toys. They have almost no storage, processing power, or graphics capability. What they do have, though, is accessibility: Cheap, small, and light, they let you connect to the Internet from almost anywhere. Netbook shipments were up sevenfold in the first quarter of 2009.

The famous Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, happens to be a recurring theme in Good Enough products. You can think of it this way: 20 percent of the effort, features, or investment often delivers 80 percent of the value to consumers. That means you can drastically simplify a product or service in order to make it more accessible and still keep 80 percent of what users want.

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The storm is officially available from Mobilink. For fans of BlackBerry phones who want something edgy, this could be a good alternative to iPhone.

BlackBerry Storm 9500 is available from Indigo, Mobilink’s post-paid brand. For more about BlackBery Storm, check our previous post.

The first-of-its-kind BlackBerry, the smartphone comes with a touch-screen that responds to your every touch whether you are typing, playing games, or simply browsing the internet. With cutting-edge multimedia capabilities, the Blackberry Storm smartphone features also include high-end email and web capabilities, a 3.2 MegaPixel camera, crisp and brilliant display (480×360 resolution) and an internal memory expandable up to 16 GB.

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PAKSAT International (Pvt), announced at 9th ITCN ASIA event, held in Karachi between August 11 to 13, 2009, that Pakistan’s new and powerful communication satellite PAKSAT-1R is scheduled to be launched in 2011.

PAKSAT-1R will replace the existing satellite PAKSAT-1 at 38 degree East, which will remain operational till the end of 2011 ensuring service continuity to current PAKSAT customers till PAKSAT-1R becomes operational. The new high power PAKSAT-1R satellite is specially designed for Pakistan and the region with strong C and Ku band footprint and coverage over South Asia, Middle East, Africa and Europe. This satellite will be ideally suited for broadcast, direct to home (DTH), telecom, data and internet services in the region.

This satellite will be ideally suited for broadcast, direct to home (DTH), data and internet services in the region.

It is not clear if the SLV will originate from Pakistan.

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An interesting development in how SIM cards can be used for better data collection and services. A change in the SIM standard has opened up new opportunities for measuring mobile network performance at the subscribers’ handset. Mobile network operators (MNOs) have traditionally measured the quality of their networks through techniques such as drive testing, network probing and analysis of engineering data from various network elements. However, to measure true service quality, it is also necessary to evaluate the users’ experience from the handset. Until recently this has not been possible, but some interesting changes in SIM card standards have provided a potential solution to this problem. Users’ perception of service performance is very much influenced by the performance of their handset. If the performance of the radio aspect of the handset is poor, then events such as loss of access and dropped calls can be wrongly attributed to poor performance of the serving network; MNOs have often, until now, been blind to these issues with network-centric measurement systems. However, a functionality of SIM cards that enables the recording, storing and forwarding of data relating to all handset activity has now been unlocked by recent changes made to the SIM and (U)SIM Application Toolkit standards by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and Smart Card Application Toolkit standards by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). This relates in particular to the ability of the card to handle the transfer of handset activity data back across the air interface to the host network. As a result, monitoring solutions based on SIM cards now appear to be gaining traction in the wider industry. With these solutions, MNOs should be able to detect, for example, service-related problems by collecting feedback on call attempts, dropped or blocked calls, call success rate, SDCCH/TCH capacity and handover failure rates in line with existing base-node-probing techniques.

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PTA has recently announced that it plans to launch 3G services in Pakistan very soon. Though no dates or time frame has been given and the word soon remains undefined. According to this news-release, launching 3G services is one of the steps it is taking to keep the upward trends in telecom growth, a sector that is already contributing 2% of the GDP and it is expected that it will grow up to 3% in the coming years.

My question is, that a country with a tele-density of 62%, mobile penetration of 94 million subscribers with a population of around 180 million, can we still expect more subscribers to sign up?

I believe we are already reaching a kind of saturation point. Please consider the following facts before answering my question:

• There is a big number of subscribers who carry more than one active sims
• Pakistani population between ages 15 and 64 that most probably uses phones, is less than 60%

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