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ISLAMABAD: The final document on first-ever-five-year Information Technology (IT) policy document is submitted to the Planning Commission of the government of Pakistan, said Salim Ghauri, Chairman of the Task Force on Information Technology and Communication Technologies (ICT).

In a statement he said that the Planning Commission will examine the document and finalize it by February 2010 before tabling it to the Parliament.

The Government of Pakistan had formed the Task Force on ICT to place Pakistan as a major player in software exports.

Other objectives included the development of domestic software/ computer hardware and telecom equipment industry, development of citizen centric applications/services especially in local language, raising quality and enrolment of I.T. education, creating large employment opportunities in IT/Telecom, making Pakistan a major I.T. manpower exporter, making recommendations for the promotion of IT/Telecom sectors, suggest incentives and estimate the investment requirements for the GOP and private sector.

The recommendations of ICT task force will go not only into the next five year plan (i.e. 2010-2015) but also to make contingency planning for reducing the impact of global economic crises on Pakistan.

Ghauri said the IT policy document has strongly recommended the government to incorporate the IT policy in the national trade policy.

He said the IT industry was all set to lead Pakistan’s exports in near future provided the government is serious in recognizing its potential like the neighbouring country.

He said the IT policy document has also urged the government to facilitate the software houses in registration with the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) to make them visible in country’s exports.

“Earnings of the companies doing I.T. exports are much higher than the figures reported by the State Bank of Pakistan,” he said, adding: “The IT industry exports have touched to the magical figure of $1 billion and ways and means are needed to be explored to encourage the IT companies for reporting their exports earnings to the SBP.”

He said the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) data suggests that only 17 I.T. companies were registered with SBP, a few years back, which has now increased to about 179 companies against a total of around 1200 IT companies registered with the PSEB.

He said the Task Force has also assigned the task of survey of the IT industry to the PSEB to ascertain the actual size of the industry, which later on would be published by the federal statistical division.

The meeting was attended by Dr Samar Mubarikman, DG Planning Commission and representatives from PSEB, Ministry of Information Technology and other departments

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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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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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