After years of decreasing prices, this month marked a turning point for the Pakistan mobile industry. Virtually all the big players have increased prices, by slapping on a 5% service charge on pre-paid celluar connections. Here is the notice from Mobilink’s website:
Dear Jazz Customer, from now onwards 5% service charges (on recharge face value) will be applicable on all recharges via Jazz Load or scratch card.
It’s hard to advertise a price increase, so the companies have chosen a very sneaky way of increasing prices - this way the advertised call rates will remain unchanged, but the actual price goes up nonetheless! This technique can also be used to lower advertised call rates - by increasing this “service charge” and adding other charges as well.
With the economy failing along with everything else as well, I think we’ve probably going not going to see lower cell phone prices for some time now.
I visited the much hyped ITCN Asia 2008, the biggest IT exhibition in Pakistan this year so far - some observations:
The many cellphone companies took up too much space with nothing to sell. Even their employees manning their stalls were lounging about bored as the masses gawked at a few random cell phones set up around their booths. There was nothing going on… just wasted space.
In a ways, cell phones have become so common place that the companies can be excused for such lackluster displays, but they could have still done much better. They could have been giving demos of how to use thier own high end features, like Internet, e-banking and the many other services on offer beyond simple telephony - which much of their client base doesn’t know enough about. Continue reading ‘ITCN 2008′
One more Wimax competitor enters the market. Hopefully they’ll function better than Wateen. Their press release is below, more later once details emerge.
On the negative side, I was promised a trial Mobilink Wimax broadband connection sometime back in Jan, and a couple of months ago someone from Mobilink got in touch and said they were about to setup the trial connection - but it never materliazed.
Continue reading ‘Mobilink launches Wimax’
I get asked this question frequently - What is the best ISP in Karachi?
My recommendation to everyone these days is Maxcom. It’s a Karachi only ISP at the time being, but has great service and prices. I’ve switched to Maxcom, was happy with CyberDSL, but Maxcom is much cheaper now, and has good service too. Cybernet remains good, but at the present moment they’re priced themselves out of the consumer market.
The next question everyone asks is why not PTCL or Link.net, the two most aggressive ISP’s in Pakistan in respect to pricing and advertising.
I wouldn’t ever get a PTCL DSL connection regardless of price because their after sales technical support is slow. Uptime is far more important to me than speed, so I’d rather have a slower connection with better service. Link.net, while better than PTCL also suffers from the too much growth too fast problem. Continue reading ‘Internet Recommendation for Karachi, April 2008′
A few days ago PKNIC, the registrar for .pk domains, terminated the domain name djuice.pk without informing it’s owner, and transferred it to Telenor, who has a trademark by the same name.
In another country they would have to contact you first, and would have probably bought it from you for millions. This is a reason I never buy any .pk domains (though I do own a few, but use them as a backup, not the primary). Registering a trademark does not give you ownership of the same name in other spaces!
There are many things wrong with PKNIC - it charges a lot more than other registrars, they never respond to emails, it’s hard to make payments, heck they lose checks mailed to them or take a month to process them - overall it’s all bad vibes, as this particular case confirms. The email is quoted below in full: Continue reading ‘One more reason to avoid .pk domains’
After three years of running pretty uneventfully, this has been a pretty bad month for the website! First, wiredpakistan got banned by the PTA, then a few hours back today it got hacked!
Whoever it was, wiped out the entire database, and then… left. Didn’t even bother to say anything. It takes time to break into a forum… if a normal user or person did it I’m sure they would have left some sort of message or something - the fact that whoever did it just left it blank raises a red flag in my mind.
The current status: The last backup I had was too soon… by the time I found out, the ‘cracked’ version had been backed up - so at the moment I have no backup. My host is casting around for older backup as I type, and hopefully it exists. It doesn’t exist! Continue reading ‘Forums Hacked’
Numerous websites around the world reported earlier this week that Pakistan had blocked Youtube. This in itself is not news, as Pakistan regularly blocks websites, but what is interesting is the manner in which they blocked it - managing to take down Youtube for the entire world!
<blockquote>The BBC News website’s technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan’s citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom “hijacked” the web server address of the popular video site.
…A leading net professional told BBC News: “This was probably a simple mistake by an engineer at Pakistan Telecom. There’s nothing to suggest this was malicious.”
IP hijacking involves taking over a web site’s unique address by corrupting the internet’s routing tables, which direct the flow of data around the world.</blockquote>
Industry professionals have been moaning about the Pakistan Internet Exchange for years about how incompetent they are, and this last issue really underlines that. PIE still has not managed to perform it’s primary function of establishing a working local internet exhange in Pakistan, and in the meantime goes about incompetently trying to block websites.
Continue reading ‘Pakistan removed Youtube from the entire Internet’
I run a popular travel website on Pakistan, offroadpakistan.com, along with a website on “all things tech†in Pakistan, wiredpakistan.com. They’re both hosted on the same server, and on Feb 3rd, the PTA ordered them blocked. I contacted a couple of ISP’s, and found out from them that my websites were being blocked at the Pakistan Internet Exchange, through which most Pakistan’s internet bandwidth is filtered. Continue reading ‘My personal brush with censorship’
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