International Conference on Telecommunication

So I attended this conference organized by ITCN-ASIA – E-Commerce Gateway – to be more precise. ITCN has a popularity association with many of the technological announcements which keep happening there every year, EDGE announcement by Telenor last year and WiMax’s first commercial deployment launch today by Wateen Telecom.

The first session was mostly filled with keynote addresses from big-hats of Nortel, Wateen, PTCL and Motorolla along with a little opening ceremony by the City Nazim right in the middle of the session. The speakers were talking about how big the Telecommunication infrastructure has grown in the country and how desperately we need the killer applications to ride on this new wave of data-com infrastructure. When inquired on what that killer application might be, the speakers pointed towards Video-on-demand and internet-applications as the biggest contender. I particularly liked the session on Hyperconnectivity and the place for 4G wireless networks in it by Nortel, their managing director explained how future devices that can be connected and need to be connected will be connected. Also, the little exchange of sentences between the two Qureshis from Wateen and PTCL (now to-be fierce competitors for their common market in OFAN and Broadband links) were entreating.

Many insightful tidbits were shared in the second – which was very humid and warm due to no air-conditioning- session. The new business model for rural areas by Nokia-Siemens Networks particularly attracted my interests. The idea is to use WiMax from the pre-existing cellphone towers to give connectivity to smaller, low-powered, low-cost (installation and operational) base stations (callled Access Points) in rural areas which are franchised to local entrepreneur and then charing a flat monthly fees for all calls made within that access point and charging the calls going outside and going inside that small, remote network. As per their studies in the pilot in India, they had more than 52% calls which were within the access point network! The presentations from ZTE containing a reminder on social, cultural and environmental obligations of telco industry to the country was also very enlightening.

And it all ended with a little trip around the exhibition and a late lunch with friends during the Karachi rains. At the end of the day, I was thinking that we are doing so much here, what else is to follow? We are still ranked quite low on tele-density, although we have one of the fastest growing voice services consumer base. Is the growth rational at all or is it all for ordering potatoes via cellphone? Can we justify the current growth with the social dynamics of our country where the rural population cannot even send a text message in English lest using internet there!