The PTA’s annual report on the state of communications in Pakistan is available online here.
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.
Continue reading ‘PTA Annual Report 2007′
A recent news report once again laments that internet access is only available to 3.3% of the countries population. An insightful comment on Slashdot on why internet access is so restricted in developing countries: Continue reading ‘Internet access only available to 3.3 percent of Pakistan’
This is brilliant news - WiMAX networks are cheap enough that internet prices should finally tumble - I expect the upcoming WiMAX networks will undercut all the existing players. Wateen’s recent advertisement “Bridging the Digital Divide” indicates that the pricing will be reasonabe. Not only that, it will provide internet access to entire cities in one go, instead of the current bits and pieces.
For a good overview of the upcoming Wimax networks, see the “the first issue of MuniWireless Magazine”:http://www.muniwireless.com/assets/docs/mwm_premier.pdf, a free 6.8 meg pdf download. It includes a complete overview of “WiMAX”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wimax networks, of which it seems that at least 3 are being put up in the near future in Pakistan.
They are listed below in the order of their expected launch. Continue reading ‘Wimax Comes to Town!’
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