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.

We have launched our broadband services in Karachi on July 1 with the name of  Mobilink Infinity.

This is a big day in the history of Mobilink – a step into providing cutting edge broadband services for our customers and enabling the next cycle of growth and opportunities for Mobilink.  In a country with 165 million people, 12 million already access the internet and only 128 thousand have access to broadband. Our aim is to make this an affordable and accessible service for the masses as we have done with GSM.

Mobilink Infinity is now a full fledged operational business within Mobilink. Mobilink Infinity will provide high speed and reliable internet connectivity along with access to a landline through VoIP.

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.

Another common ISP in Karachi is Worldcall - I understand WorldCall has gotten a lot better now, but they’re still not close enough qualitatively to the likes of Maxcom & Cyber. I subscribed to a WorldCall cable internet connection recently at a relative’s house, but he switched over to DSL on his own accord because of frequent outages. Anecdotal evidence, but WorldCall’s cable internet network still runs like a smoker on it’s last legs, coughing and spluttering, and stopping to rest every so often.

These ISP’s are appealing as a backup, but not as a primary link. Unlink Maxcom or Cyber, they won’t compensate for service outages, which is a big negative. (In my experience, other people have managed to get compensation for outages).

I think PTCL is overselling, they’re not investing in their people or equipment to cope with the number of connections they will soon reach. I had hopes for Wateen Wimax, but they have horribly messed up their network implementation, I figure it’ll take them till 2009 to iron the kinks out and get it running properly.

After all these years of using various ISP’s in Pakistan, and considering the large customer base here - the Karachi consumer internet market is probably bigger than the rest of the country put together - it really suprised me that there is only one ISP I can recommend!

For up-to-date reports by people all over Pakistan on their ISP experiences, visit the wiredpakistan forums.

Disclaimer: This recommendation is only valid for consumer internet. For corporate links there are many companies with great service, albeit priced only for the corporate customer.

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:

I own a blog Djuice.PK ( A youth entertainment and current affairs
blog) . I have been running this over the last one and half year and
was using this to post entertainment, mobile phone information and
current affairs information. Today all of sudden this was blocked by
the PKNIC.

I have contacted the PKNIC and came to know that my domain is being
transferred to telenor. I just wounder what is this all about?

Why not any prior notice served to me if there was any problem in my
domain held at PKNIC . Why all of sudden after one and half year PKNIC
realised that it should be transferred to telenor.

It is against the natural law of justice to make unilateral decisions.
I have two email addresses in PKNIC contacts database for this domain
and both are fully working and regularly checked by myself.

I have never received any e-mail stating that there is any dispute or
trade mark issue on my domain from the PKNIC

I have to admit my blog was very open on the current affairs issue in
Pakistan and there were blogs on Chief Justice issue other matters
against Musharraf regime.

I have temporarly moved my blog to http://djuice.pk.f4f.asia

If you don’t own it, a domain is not your property. A trademark owner does not automatically gain possession of all possible names in other spaces. An example: Internationally, in quite a few countries Google had to buy the domain gmail for many dollars after they launched the service, in yet others the owners refused to sell, and that was that.

A follow email from the actual domain owner:

My domain have been hacked / hijacked by the Telenor  Pakistan with
the help of PKNIC Pakistan as they have never made a dispute against
me over this. I have been running this blog very successfully from
last one and half year.

Well I know the PKNIC policies and other terms and conditions and I am
also aware of the International rules by the ICANN. In any case before
a domain transfer to the other party who claims that it may be their
trade mark or infringing their rights one have to file a dispute and
the PKNIC should have given me a chance to listen my version of
statement on this issue.

According to ICANN rules malafide intentions by the registrant should
be proofed based on three different point failure of any one of this
does not qualify the domain transfer to other party who make claims on
this.

These points by the ICANN are more or less as follows.

1. A Proof That Domain Was Registered in Bad Faith

2. A Proof That Domain is being Used by a Business Competitor

3. A Proof that Domain is not in Use and is Registered only for Re-
Selling

I have an in depth study of different Dispute Cases on Domains However
I am Confident That By Law It was not possible to get my domain. So
after one and half year  Telenor have bribed the PKNIC Staff and they
without listening my point of view blocked my blog.

This transfer is 100% illegal and immoral and call into question the
PKNIC quality of the service. I have shifted my blog to a new domain
http://www.DjuiceBlog.com

I am sure that Telnor can not bribe the .com registry this time.

Shame on Telenor and PKNIC for steeling my domain  with out any NOTICE
without any CASE and without any Chance to LISTEN about my rights on
this DOMAIN.

THIS IS AGAINST THE LAW TO MAKE UNILATERAL DECISIONS

The cellphone is dead, long live the smartphone! In all fairness, despite the advent of the iphone and the many Windows mobile devices, the smartphone is not quite there yet.

My old smartphone - a Nokia 6120 is taking a hike to greener pastures, so a new one is needed.

The options are, in table form:

These phones represent the current top of the pops smartphones available in Karachi. The ones not on this list don’t belong here, especially the high-end Sony’s as all the good ones like the P1i and the W960 don’t support Edge. All the above phones support GPRS Edge AND Wifi.

Here is a short overview, gathered from reading many reviews on the internet, and encounters in the wild with these phones:

Apple Iphone

This, frankly, is both overrated and underrated at the same time. The interface is amazing, but where the Iphone falls short is the lack of native apps. There are no ebook readers, no Opera Mini (the best browser for the small screen), and a whole laundry list of other features which any other smart phone has.

But where it bets them all, is the wonderfully responsive touch interface, which leaves other touch phones choking on so much dust that most of them have checked out of the race into a asthma ward.

Have you ever seen anyone showing off a picture album on any other phone? No, even though Windows based phones have had very nice large screens for years - cause it’s just so bloody hard that it takes all the fun out of it!

Nokia N82

This is a brilliant phone, and the most phone like phone out of all the smartphones on the market - and on top of all that, has a proper 5MP camera with xenon flash bolted on.

The screen size is the only drawback here. It’s just not that much bigger than a regular phones.

Drawbacks: Flashy color, large size - looks too much like the cellphones of ages gone by.

Nokia N95 8GB

Same as the N82, except a slider with a much bigger screen.

Very nice, but there is this little something missing. The phone feels too much like a child’s toy, which is a serious downer considering it’s for 42K!

Nokia N81 8GB

This is a good option for a phone + music player all in one. The drawback compared to the two phones above is the camera - it’s the normal sucky cellphone camera. Oh, and there’s no GPS either, but in Pakistan that’s a useless feature anyways.

All the three Nokia’s are very similar, sunning the same software, with the only difference being the form factor and screen size.

Nokia E61i

The most sensible phone of the entire lot. It easily out blackberries the blackberry, and does just about everything a pc can do.

This would be the perfect phone, but then you have to join the cult of the qwerty keyboard. There are people who swear by them, and can do wondrous things with them, but pecking away at those teeny tiny qwerty keys isn’t for everybody!

the not-really biased conclusion: The Apple iPhone!

Screen size and quality is important, very important. The iphone has the most crippled software out of the box of any smartphone, even going back to the Jurassic age of smartphones, but the 160 DPI screen is wow! For consuming content, it can’t be beat. If you’re not a geek, than the iphone is the only phone which you’ll actually be able to use all the advanced features, so that’s a pretty big plus point right there.

The only issue (read pain in the ass) is the fact that it has be unlocked, so everytime Apple releases a new update you have to jump though a few hoops to update the device.

The phone I ended up buying: Sadly, monetary reality intervened, and I’m sticking with a 5000Rs. Phone for now. After all, they do practically everything these more expensive flashy phones do, don’t they?

Um, No.

They don’t.

If you actually use the many whizbang features of today’s phones, then they’re so far better than the el-cheapo models that it’s definitely worth the price.

But the bling, oh the bling! My next device will the iPhone v2.0, which either Nokia or Apple should be coming out near the end of this year.

The perfect phone isn’t out yet, but the iphone is close, oh so close.

The biggest reason to wait till the summer is the upcoming Google Android, which is going to shake up the cell phone market. The release of the Apple SDK for the Iphone should lead to a lot of new hotness for the Iphone.

Exciting times ahead for cell phone toting humans, as the cellphone becomes increasingly usably useful.

After such a long review, the best value for money smartphone remains the Nokia 6120 Classic at 13,500 Rs, doing everything the phones above do, and at a much nicer form factor. The only drawback is the screen size, which is a smallish 2 inches, but the screen quality comes in a second, before the Iphone, and after all the other phones listed above.

Other websites

http://whatmobile.com.pk/ :: This is the website I use to look up cell phone prices and availability in Pakistan. I’ve found the shops are generally selling at these prices, or in some cases lower. So it’s pretty accurate.

http://www.mobileburn.com/ :: Comprehensive reviews of cellphones

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!

Best case scenario: A few days posts will be lost. Worst case: A year’s worth.. I didn’t keep too many backups.

There is no backup. I’m creating a new forum for the time being. I don’t know how that will work though, with years of posts all dissolved into the ether. It’s almost like they were killed. Heck, it’s exactly like they were killed.

I’ve uploaded the raw access logs for this month. Perhaps someone might be able to track who killed the forums.

<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.

From the (inevitable) Slashdot discussion:

<blockquote>They announced a route [merit.edu] out of AS 17557 [apnic.net] sending all traffic from ANYWHERE on the Internet to a black-hole in Pakistan. The effect was to make YouTube unreachable from ANYWHERE until the route was filtered by the backbone providers. They claimed it was an “oops”.</blockquote>

It’s not just Pakistani’s who’re fed up with PTCL:

<blockquote>PCCW took far far too long to fix their broken customer (Pakistan Telecom) … Argh.</blockquote>

The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” — John Gilmore

The really frightening thing is that the people over at PTCL, PTA and PIE are the ones deciding internet policy in Pakistan!

I sent repeated emails to every single public email address belonging to the PTA, PTCL and PIE, yet I never received a reply to any of my queries trying to find out why my website was blocked. Finally, someone who personally knew the head of enforcement at the PTA got in touch with him, sent me his personal email and phone number, and asked him to do something. That finally got me a terse one line reply from the PTA saying “they’d look into it”, and a week later on Feb 15th another email saying “it’s now working”. I talked to lawyers, newspapers, the media, PTCL, PIE, the PTA, ISP’s, and a lot of other random people over the 11 days the block remained in place – and I still don’t know why, by whom and for what reason.

My websites are now unblocked, but what really troubles me is the arbitrary nature in which they were blocked, especially considering that offroadpakistan in particular, is a popular website both inside and outside Pakistan, and portrays a very positive image of Pakistan - every day I get positive feedback from all over the world from the website. A number of international websites and newspapers reported on this ban, and while it’s a very small on the larger scheme of things, it’s no wonder Pakistan has such a negative image – all these small, mind-numbingly senseless actions taking by the Govt. add up.

Some other questions the block raised in my mind are is who exactly is the PTA to be going about blocking individual websites? From the charter on their own website, as far as I can tell, this does not fall into their jurisdiction – they’re set up to police the telecommunications industry, dealing with the likes of Mobilink and PTCL – not individual websites. I am not a lawyer, but from their charter, the PTA was not set up as a censorship body, nor does it have the infrastructure in place to do so effectively.

While it is legal in Pakistan for the government to block websites, they must follow some sort of system, codified by a law - at the moment from what I can gather the whole procedure is completely arbitrary. There is a reason the police are required to get and justify and procure an arrest warrant, and there are courts in which you can contest your arrest, post bail, engage lawyers. As more of our lives move online – and if you live in Pakistan, even if you’ve never seen a computer, many of the important aspects of your life – id cards, social security, passports, bank accounts, police records (soon) – and much else is solely online, stored on various computer networks, our personal online identities become increasingly important. Online worlds need laws and policing too, but policing never works arbitrarily – there has to be checks and balances, which today are completely missing here.

My websites are run as a hobby – I generate no income from them, so the 11 day blockage didn’t affect me monetarily – but I know people here whose sole income is now generated online – whether a one man web design firm who depends on his website to attract clients, to people whose sole income is from advertisements on their websites – what will they do if their websites get blocked? As Pakistan approaches the internet age, and the government is proposing rolling out a nation-wide “broadband for all” scheme to bring high speed internet to the masses, more and more people will be logging onto the internet and working online.

I have heard from a source that perhaps the reason my website was blocked was because someone at PIE didn’t ‘like’ it – and so he blocked it. The PTA and PIE seem bent on bringing the regular Pakistani system of nepotism, favoritism and corruption onto the internet also – where you can get access to your competitors website blocked, or worse, slowed down, receive copies of your email correspondence – and much worse.

The Internet is amazing, and many people still don’t grasp the sheer overarching importance of how it’s changing the world and it’s only just begun! We here in Pakistan seem hell-bent on choking it at birth on here, afraid of the open access it provides to everything – especially the government.

An edited version of this was published in the Dawn newspaper, Feb 23, 2008.

I’ve copied the paper to this website: Broadband Penetration Study Pakistan Feb 2008. The link on the Ministry’s website is so horrendously long that I didn’t want to go near it! The gist of the paper is correct, Pakistan as a whole is lagging behind in widespread internet availability.

Comments on the paper from elsewhere:

The  major conclusion points of the documents are:

• Pakistan’s broadband penetration is very low
• Currently there are around 100K Broadband subscribers which need to be taken to 1.6 million by 2010 (1% of population)
• This low penetration is earning bad scores for us under the WSIS measuring criteria & there is a strong need to improve the same
• Three approaches have been suggested for the GoP’s intervention in this ‘dismal’ state of broadband affairs:
  • No intervention - leave it to market; slow broadband growth expected
  • Bundle with Basic Services - only rural areas will benefit; existing broadband provides will loose
  • Tackle issue with a new format - dedicated efforts are expected to yield better results; divided in various phases

A rant here: On the Clueless Ministry of Information Technology Pakistan.

My take: For a academic study of broadband penetration in Pakistan, the report seems to have no original research or study, and most of the figures and charts used have been lifted from various other reports. The report makes various predictions of future bandwidth demand, and doesn’t give the basis on how it is calculating the numbers.

There are are figures from a PTCL, Orascom and Economic Survey 2001 - in the internet age, a survey conducted in 2001 is worse than useless - it’s probably wrong. You can’t use that to extrapolate future demand in 2008 looking at 2012!

So yes, it’s nice that the Ministry is thinking of the bigger picture, but I wish it would do so through more capable eyes.

The possible reasons for censoring this particular website - none really, though there is a lot of criticism of PTCL, Wateen, PTA, and a few other local internet companies, but nothing out of the extraordinary.

I’m reposting an earlier article on internet censorship which I’d written but never posted here before, which explains how the government tries to censor the internet in Pakistan.

Internet Censorship the Pakistani way

March 2nd 2006 the Supreme Court of Pakistan ordered the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority to block 12 websites. This list was in addition to the hundreds of thousands of websites which Pakistan already blocks. Up till now, most internet users in Pakistan had never really cared to speak up about this censorship, but this new blacklist caused millions of personal websites hosted at Blogspot to be banned. There are hundreds of Pakistani websites hosted at Blogspot, so this action by the government led internet users to form an action group against this ban.

To understand what exactly it means to block a website on the internet, one has to first understand how the internet works.

The internet is a strange beast. Many of us use it every day - not just when sitting in front of a computer, but every time when using a credit card, filling fuel, sending a SMS, taking a flight - in short just about every modern activity depends on the internet. The use of the internet is spreading everywhere, even to the most surprising places - some farmers in India receive current market prices for their crops on internet enabled cellphones, and the early warning system for tsunamis being developed after the 2004 ocean quake works through the internet.

The internet is a gigantic 3 dimensional spider web, where every intersection is a computer which is connected to every other computer on the internet - regardless of its location. The Internet is not built by design - it grows organically as computers and networks join it as they please. It is hard to visualize what the Internet has grown to now just 30 odd years after starting with a handful of computers. The map above represents just a partial view of the Internet. The amount of computers on the Internet is staggering - recent estimates puts the figure close to a billion computers, and growing fast.

For the lay person, the internet generally means the world wide web. The internet is actually the underlying platform on which the web runs. The internet is made up of computers and cables - the computers send packets of information to other computers on the Internet through these cables, and the beauty of the Internet is that these packets can go through any path. Put up a packet with a correct address anywhere on the Internet, and it will arrive at its destination, usually in a few milliseconds.

The way the internet works is very simple. Multiple independent networks of rather arbitrary design are all connected to each other. Every computer on the Internet has a unique address, so when you send a message to another computer on the Internet, the underlying software breaks the message up into data packets, puts the destination address on every one of these packets, and sends them on to the next computer it’s connected to. As the packets arrive, each receiving computer looks at the address, and if it’s not addressed to that pc, sends it onwards. This process happens over and over again until the packet arrives at its destination. Each packet of data takes the best possible route available to it, which will vary even over the milliseconds the sending computer takes to send out each packet.

The internet was designed from the ground up to resist damage - and censorship is just another form of damage to the internet. If the data doesn’t make it through to its destination, then another route will be automatically tried, until all possible routes are exhausted. So if one computer, or a whole bunch of them, decides to block certain types of data, then they will be automatically bypassed.

Pakistan has 3 major internet links to the world, which consist of two submarine fibre optic links and a few satellite links. All of these are controlled by the Pakistan Internet Exchange, or PIE, which monitors all incoming and outgoing Internet traffic from Pakistan. The primary purpose of PIE is to filter content as the Government deems fit. A secondary purpose is to keep track of all incoming and outgoing e-mails, which by parliamentary order are kept for a period of at least 3 months.

If the government controls all outside links to the world, then one might think that it should be a simple matter to censor the internet. Yet this isn’t the case, for the current filtering system in place is very crude. There is a list of banned addresses which the computers installed at the Pakistan Internet Exchange look at, and accordingly block requests by users to the computers on the blacklist. This is where the internet comes in - for if an address is blocked, than all you have to do is go through another, unblocked address. This computer is called a proxy server, and it acts as a man in the middle between you and the blocked computer. Any computer on the Internet can do the job of a proxy - so potentially, there are a billion ways of bypassing censorship!

Many of the top universities in the world like Duke, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Princeton (to name just a few) have set up such proxy systems to enable users around the world to bypass censorship. Besides universities and individuals acting on their own to protect the freedom of speech, there are many government and privately funded projects set up specifically for the purpose of allowing users to bypass any form of internet censorship. The rise of peer to peer networking means that every single computer, even home PC’s formerly not thought of as servers, can be used to serve up content to any other PC.

The second, slightly harder to bypass form of censorship, as implemented in China, is to have a list of banned words, and censor those on the fly. As users in China request a web page, the incoming page is first inspected by government servers, and blocked if a banned term like democracy is present on that page. Human censors are also actively looking at what people browse on the internet, and actively block websites as they see fit. This method is also easily bypassed by connecting to a proxy server which scrambles the page as it sends it to you. Take a look at the links listed at the bottom for many other ways to bypass internet censorship, or just do a google search to bring up a few hundred thousand websites which will tell you how.

So, what exactly does it mean to block a website? Can it even be done with today’s technology?

Simply put, with current technology the only way to restrict information on the Internet is to ban it all together. There is no middle way - the technology is just not there today. One good example is China, which spends billions of dollars, and employs over 40,000 full time government employees in Beijing alone to monitor and restrict Chinese usage of the internet. The Chinese government tries to control and restrict access to a wide variety of topics, such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Falun Gong, Tibet, Taiwan, pornography or democracy. Despite the most sophisticated filtering system in the world, China has failed miserably at its attempt to censor the Internet..

The Supreme Court and Government of Pakistan have obviously an extremely limited understanding of the Internet, and do not grasp what exactly they have done. They are still thinking along the lines of traditional media, made up of books, newspapers and magazines, and probably think they have blocked certain ‘bad’ issues, and that everything else will be accessible as usual.

Most, if not all people savvy enough to operate a computer are easily able to bypass any technological blocks the govt. puts up. At best, the various censorship solutions the government will implement over the next few years will discriminate between the technological haves and have-nots.

It is sad to see Pakistan walk down that same road. At best, attempts to censor the internet will give the censors a false sense of security that they are doing something, while slowing down the internet for the entire country, as well as further degrading its image throughout the world.

The internet, although a network in name and geography, is a creature of the computer, not the traditional network of the telephone or television industry. It will, indeed it must, continue to change and evolve at the speed of the computer industry. Trying to impose artificial barriers on the internet is akin to building sand castles on the beach - sand walls can’t stop the spray of information coming over the walls, and the next wave of technology will completely overwhelm the entire castle.

In the future, technology will enable governments to control the creation and flow of information. The slippery slope to George Orwell’s 1984 starts here, when we allow governments control of what we can see, read and watch. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and once the censorship drive to ban all bad things starts; it’s a hard animal to stop.

Of interest is that the report says Wateen Telecom’s Wimax network can support 1 million plus users, making it the largest Wimax deployment in the world - and that it is expected to launch at the end of this year.

At the present moment, Pakistan has about 79,000 broadband users - which for a country of almost 170 million remains staggeringly low. Many of these 70,000 broadband users are on 128kbps bandwidth limited connections, which isn’t broadband, as the PTA report itself points out.

My own estimate is that the true number of broadband connections in Pakistan is a fourth of PTA’s number - this is the generous estimate, and could be as low as a sixth of PTA’s number. So we’re looking at only 13,000 to 20,000 broadband connections in Pakistan! On the bright side, the report estimates that there will be 5 million broadband connections by 2010.

This is the PTA, and just to point out yet again that they still don’t quite get the internet, they’ve published the report in pdf only, and that too at a hefty 100kb per page. I estimated that the same report could easily have been a fifth of the size with a little compression. A html version would be nice too!