I have been talking about mobile commerce and mobile banking for quite some time now. My recent article on the topic had been on the possibility of the telecom companies posing a challenge to the traditional banking industry in the mobile domain.

This week, we will be witnessing mobile banking taking a new turn. This week, we will see heads joined together to figure out innovative ways to cater to the mobile banking needs of today’s tech-savvy customer and easy to use services for the “un-banked” populace of Pakistan.

I spoke of stats earlier: Pakistan has 20 million bank accounts as opposed to over 90 million mobile subscribers. All of whom are potential mobile banking customers. There seems to be a race to tap in to this market.

This week, we will witness the launch of “EP” by Telenor Pakistan. EP will be a unique experience altogether. We might also be seeing something coming in from one of the leading banks in Pakistan in collaboration with one of the most famous telecom brand-names in Pakistan.

With that said, October 14th and October 15th will be very important days for the years to come as I believe our banks and telecom operators might be setting benchmarks for the way things work in the future.

There seems to be, I admit, a sense of secrecy around this particular post. It is to preserve the right of the marketing teams of the banks and telecom operators to keep the launch ‘special’ for everyone.

We cannot, however, rule out the element of confusion that exists over the many ways mobile-banking can be implemented. Everyone has different ideas and more importantly, differing interests associated with this business. The PTA and the State Bank of Pakistan could ease this problem by stepping in with a standardized model to be followed at all costs for basic banking while allowing banks and telecom operators to experiment with value-added services.

It is indeed delightful for me to see, like I had spoken about it earlier, a unique collaboration between banks and telecom operators to tap in to a market which has remained more-or-less unexplored throughout the world and especially in Pakistan.

What is to be seen, however, like Telenor has decided to cater to the un-banked and rural areas of Pakistan (just as they focused their core telecom operations on rural areas) – how other banks and operators develop business models to allow those who don’t have bank accounts to use their handsets for basic financial services.

For now, mobile-banking is hot. We can assume sustainable growth in this domain with concerted efforts to increase awareness and educate the masses on the use of these services. How the banks and operators make it a ‘need’ for their customers is just about to be unveiled.

Mobile commerce, mobile payments, cell phone based financial transactions (or whatever you would like to call them) have been discussed and debated all over the world over the past few years. Basic m-commerce applications have been introduced already in several countries, including Pakistan.

It is widely anticipated that telecom operators and vendors pose a serious challenge to the banking industry as they take electronic banking or e-banking mobile.

Speaking of statistics, a total of 1.6 billion bank accounts exist worldwide. Compare this to 4 billion cell phone users. Speaking of Pakistan, the banking industry is host to close to 20 million bank accounts as compared to over 90 million cell phone subscribers. Telecom operators and vendors have good enough statistical evidence to believe they already have a head start! Read the rest of this entry »

This is a question I keep asking myself and adjusting my targets, goals and ambitions. The telecom industry, especially in Pakistan, faces a tough time these days and the situation is even tougher for us fresh grads. There appears to be an absolute scarcity of internships and/or entry level engineering positions.

This scarcity could be due to many reasons. It could actually be a lack of requirement in the industry or it could just be because me and you do not have the right contacts and resources. It does matter in Pakistan. It matters all over the world.

Determining whether or not our job search is in the right direction is a tough ask. Being a fresh graduate, you find yourself inexperienced in most circumstances to evalulate yourself. But here’s a list of questions I’ve thought and have been asking myself that can be done to keep a check on where our job hunt is headed to:

• Have you specifically and carefully determing your aims and objectives?
• Have you spent enough time improvising upon and tweaking your CV?
• Have you developed a network of good contacts for yourself?
• Have you made sure all your contacts knows that you’re looking for a job now?
• Have you been following up on your job applications properly and aggressively?
• Have you been receiving any replies to your emails, phone calls or text messages?
• Have you analyzed and optimized the content of your emails/letters that you are sending out to potential employers?
• And most importantly, have you been praying properly?

Keep asking yourself these questions and you will know with the adjustments you make that you are headed in the right direction. You need to feel the confidence in your job search to be sure you are in the right direction.

And to all my fellow fresh grads. I know its very tough. Let us hope for the best and let us keep putting in our best efforts. Let us make sure that a tough job market in the telecom industry does not discourage us from our objectives.

Best of luck! Have a great day everyone!

Yesterday, a delegation comprising of CEO’s from all cellular operators met the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr. Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani pledging to make a combined investment of over USD 1 billion in the coming fiscal year.

Government will continue to provide incentives to telecom industry, says Gilani

ISLAMABAD (June 04 2009): Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani on Wednesday assured telecom operators that the government will continue to provide incentives to the telecom industry so that the sector may continue to attract more investment and create more jobs.

The Prime Minister was talking to the Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of telecom companies in Pakistan who called on him here and discussed with him matters relating to the cellular companies in perspective of the upcoming budget. A statement said that the CEOs of Mobilink, Warid, Ufone, Telenor and China Mobile expressed their commitment to jointly invest at least $1 billion in infrastructure, capital expenditure and technology in the next fiscal year to complement the enabling environment that the government is providing as a stimulus…

Source: Business Recorder,

http://brecorder.com/index.php?id=918957&currPageNo=1&query=&search=&term=&supDate=

This was followed by news that is around in the print media that the PTA shall be recommeding tax cuts for telecom services for the coming fiscal year - I am sure telecom companies will breathe a sigh of relief if these recommendations of the PTA are actually implemented.

Here is an excerpt from the Daily Dawn:

Cellular firms want ‘friendly’ budget

LAHORE, June 4: On the request of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA), the government may reduce General Sales Tax (GST) and SIM activation charges on telecom services in the upcoming budget.

The PTA will move the proposal on the demand of telecom companies, which plead that their revenue has been shrunk “drastically” owing to heavy taxes and stiff competition.

PTA Chairman Dr Muhammad Yasin told Dawn on Thursday if the government accepted the authority’s suggestions, it would encourage the foreign direct investments (FDIs) and help sustain growth in the sector…

Source: Dawn

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/national/cellular-firms-want-friendly-budget-569

The telecom industry is in a dire need for policies that encourage and supplement telecom growth in Pakistan. Expansion and investment initiatives have been hampered by a drastic devaluation of the Pakistani Rupee by upto PKR 20 against 1 USD. This has effected the overall profits of the foreign players in the Pakistani telecom market and forced them to pull their brakes.

We hope the government considers this proposal and brings about policies encouraging further FDI - especially when we are preparing for a 3G rollout (as per the PTA plans on paper) - and supplementing and strengthening telecom companies in Pakistan.

The world has been hit terribly by the Global economic recession. The hit has been particularly hard for cell phone manufacturers that include big names like Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorolla. I am particularly concerned about Nokia - the fact that its sales have plummetted by 90% is alarming indeed.

This post presents a news from various sources ofquarterly reports coming from manufacturers.

Nokia

Nokia’s net profit falls 90 percent

If you were wondering how bad things have gotten for the mobile handset market, just take a look at Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cell phones.

The company on Thursday reported a 90 percent fall in first-quarter net profits as the global recession took a big bite out of demand for mobile devices.

For the first quarter, which ended March 31, Nokia said that net profits fell to 122 million euros ($161.3 million). A year earlier the company reported net profits of 1.22 billion euros. Analysts had expected the company to report net profits of about 306 million euros.

The company’s sales fell to 9.27 billion euros from 12.66 billion euros last year. This was also below analyst expectations, which were counting on sales of around 9.80 billion euros.

Read full Story

Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson posts loss, plans to cut 2,000 jobs

STOCKHOLM – Mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson on Friday posted a euro293 million ($387 million) net loss in the first quarter on falling sales and said it would slash an additional 2,000 jobs to cut costs.

The result was the third consecutive quarterly loss for the Sony Corp. and LM Ericsson AB joint venture, which reported a profit of euro133 million in the same period in 2008.

Sales in the January-March quarter tumbled by 36 percent to euro1.7 billion, from euro2.7 billion a year earlier.

Sony Ericsson attributed the sales drop to weaker demand for mobile phones, with distributors and retailers trimming inventories amid the economic slowdown.

Read full Story

Motorola

Motorola posts $3.6b loss as devices sales fall by 26 percent

Motorola reported a fourth quarter loss of $3.6 billion, or $1.57 a share, hit by falling sales, particularly in its mobile handset unit. Sales dropped 26 percent, sinking to $7.1 billion, and missing analyst expectations of $7.2 billion. Mobile Devices saw sales drop to $2.35 billion, a 51 percent decline compared to the same period last year. The operating loss was $595 million, compared to an operating loss of $388 million in the year-ago quarter. The struggling handset maker shipped 19.2 million handsets in the quarter, which it estimated gave it a 6.5 percent of the global market. It blamed the unit’s poor performance on the weakening economy and on “gaps in its portfolio.” Motorola also said it was suspending its dividend, and was embarking on a cost savings plan that aimed to save $1.5 billion in 2009. In another blow, Paul Liska, its chief financial officer, is leaving the company. SVP and corporate controller Edward J. Fitzpatrick has been named acting CFO until Motorola can find a replacement.

Read full Story

Other market players like Apple (net loss o f $69 million) and Palm (net loss of $841,000 approx.) have also reported losses over the first quarter.

Blackberry, however, seems to be gaining some ground with its demand rising, particularly in the Middle East and in South-Asian countries like Pakistan.

The mobile handset manufacturing industry does seem to be going through a really rough patch for now. Given the circumstances, there is not much hope for the immediate future but things might stabilize over the course of a couple of years, I hope.

Something that should is worrying for me as a Telecom professional is that this sharp drop in demand of handheld devices and cell phones will have a direct impact on service operators, but let us all hope for the best.

The market in Pakistan is promising indeed. There still is quite a lot of potential for growth here. Let us all hope for the best!

SAN FRANCISCO - The Internet engineering community says its biggest mistake in developing IPv6 - a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol - is that it lacks backwards compatibility with the existing Internet Protocol, known as IPv4.

At a panel discussion held here Tuesday, leaders of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) admitted that they didn’t do a good enough job making sure native IPv6 devices and networks would be able to communicate with their IPv4-only counterparts when they designed the industry standard 13 years ago.

“The lack of real backwards compatibility for IPv4 was the single critical failure,” says Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer for the Internet Society. “There were reasons at the time for doing that…But the reality is that nobody wants to go to IPv6 unless they think they’re friends are doing it, too.”

Originally, IPv6 developers envisioned a scenario where end-user devices and network backbones would operate IPv4 and IPv6 side-by-side in what’s called dual-stack mode.

However, they didn’t take into account that some IPv4 devices would never be upgraded to IPv6, and that some all-IPv6 networks would need to communicate with IPv4-only devices or content.

IPv6 proponents say the lack of mechanisms for bridging between IPv4 and IPv6 is the single, biggest reason that most ISPs and enterprises haven’t deployed IPv6.

“Our transition strategy was dual-stack, where we would start by adding IPv6 to the hosts and then gradually over time we would disable IPv4 and everything would go smoothly,” says IETF Chair Russ Housley, who added that IPv6 transition didn’t happen according to plan.

In response, the IETF is developing new IPv6 transition tools that will be done by the end of 2009, Housley said.

“The reason more IPv6 deployment isn’t being done is because the people who are doing the job found that they needed these new transition tools,” Housley said. “These tools are necessary to ease deployment.”

IPv6 is needed because the Internet is running out of IPv4 addresses. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support approximately 4.3 billion individually addressed devices on the Internet. IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and can support so many devices that only a mathematical expression - 2 to the 128th power - can quantify its size.

Experts predict IPv4 addresses will be gone by 2012. At that point, all ISPs, government agencies and corporations will need to support IPv6 on their backbone networks. Today, only a handful of U.S. organizations – including the federal government and a few leading-edge companies like Bechtel and Google - have deployed IPv6 across their networks.

Richard Jimmerson, chief information officer for the American Registry for Internet Numbers, says demand for IPv4 address space has not slowed down despite the global economic meltdown.

Jimmerson said he’s seen a shift among network operators during the last year as it has become clear that IPv4 addresses are truly running out. “They’re further along in moving towards acceptance of IPv6,” he said.

When IPv4 addresses run out, ISPs and enterprises will require several new transition mechanisms to bridge between IPv4 and IPv6 devices, IETF leaders say.

The transition mechanisms under development by the IETF are:
* Dual-Stack Lite, a technique developed by Comcast that allows for incremental deployment of IPv6. With Dual-Stack Lite, a carrier would give new customers special home gateways that take IPv4 packets from their legacy PCs and printers and ship them over an IPv6 tunnel to a carrier-grade network address translator (NAT).

* NAT64, a mechanism for translating IPv6 packets into IPv4 packets and vice versa. A related tool, dubbed DNS64, allows an IPv6-only device to call up an IPv4-only name server. These two tools would allow an IPv6 device to communicate with IPv4-only devices and content.

The IETF also is considering work that would allow ISPs to share a single public IPv4 address among multiple users.

“We need to take a two-pronged approach,” says Alain Durand, director of IPv6 architecture and Internet governance in the Office of the CTO for Comcast. “We need to embrace IPv6, but we also need to build an IPv6 transition bridge that will allow for sharing of IPv4 addresses and IPv4 and IPv6 tunneling.”

Durand says these transition mechanisms are required so that IPv6 “can be deployed incrementally.”

Jari Arkko, an engineer with Ericsson Research, says the IETF community has shown “tremendous interest” in developing these IPv6 transition mechanisms.

These mechanisms aren’t about “extending IPv4 for eternity,” Daigle says. “We still need to be doing this to make sure that we can do a global transition from a primarily IPv4 network to a primarily IPv6 network.”

The overall message of the IETF panel was that network operators need to plan for IPv6 deployment whether they like it or not.

IETF leaders say the networking industry is starting to accept that they have to migrate to IPv6, even if it doesn’t offer any concrete business advantages.

“People are deploying, albeit slowly,” says Kurtis Lindqvist, CEO of Netnod Internet Exchange in Stockholm. “The core networks are already capable of IPv6…Our biggest challenge is to make the transition work.”

Daigle says the business case for IPv6 is simple: If companies want to have Internet applications that continue to work and scale, they need to deploy IPv6.

“IPv6 is the path forward,” Daigle says. “There are a lot of technologies being discussed and being promoted for extending the use of IPv4 but that really is a bridging mechanism because the path forward is IPv6.”

Daigle says the time for CIOs to start planning for IPv6 is now, before IPv4 addresses are depleted.

Network operators need “`to be aware of [IPv6] and accept it as coming and look forward to it as coming,” Daigle says. “If at this point, IPv6 is not in your refresh cycle planning, it should be. If you haven’t done a review of what applications would be impacted in a heavily NAT-ted world or in an IPv6 world, you should.”

Source: NetworkWorld, http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/032509-ipv6-mistake.html?page=1

In an increasingly mobile world, we have a lot of networks around us. A network between two phones, a network between a phone and a computer, a network between two computers etc.

An Ambeint Network is basically a network integration solution to the modern-day problems of switching from one network to the other in order to keep in contact with the outside world. This project aims to develop a network software-driven infrastructure that will run on top of all current or future network physical infrastructures to provide a way for devices to connect to each other, and through each other to the outside world.

If you still have’nt grasped what it is about, let’s take this example. I often use my GPRS/EDGE enabled cell phone to connect to the internet using my laptop which has a bluetooth connection. This is how I connect:

Laptop -> ( via Bluetooth) -> Mobile -> (via GPRS/EDGE) -> Mobile phone network

My laptop also has WLAN/WiFi connectivity options available. The GPRS/EDGE option is definitely very expensive as compared to WLAN which is normally free of cost.

Suppose that I am ‘on-the-go’ and pass into an area where WLAN is available, would’nt it be great that my bluetooth connection (which uses my phone’s GPRS/EDGE connection to connect to the internet) seamlessly transfers the connection to the WLAN/WiFi, saving me a lot of money? And again, when I move out of the WLAN/WiFi coverage area, my internet connection gets back to my expensive but necessary EDGE/GPRS connection! (If at all it is that necessary!)

This is precisely what the Ambient Network Project aims at providing. Seamless integration of multiple networks in our use - using a software-driven infrastructure which switches easily between the various available networking options.

A little about the project, The Ambient Network Project is another collaborative project under the European Union’s 6th Framework Program that investigates future communication systems beyond today’s fixed and 3rd generation (3G) mobile networks.

The Ambient Network Project website describes the project as:

“In the telecommunications world of future, there will be many different networks. To provide users with the services they want irrespective of their location, these networks have to cooperate. In a highly mobile environment, this network cooperation will have to be established ‘on the fly’. The Ambient Networks project is about making this fast network cooperation a reality. Through R&D, co-funded by the EU through the 6th Framework Programme, the Ambient Network project will ensure that the European telecommunications industry is prepared for the future.”

The concept is beautifully elaborated in a few lines as:

“Next generation communication networks will be characterized by the coexistence of multiple technologies and user devices in an integrated fashion. The increasing number of devices owned by a single user will lead to a new communication paradigm: users owning multiple devices that form cooperative networks, and networks of different users that communicate with each other, e.g., acquiring Internet access through each other. In this communication scenario no user intervention should be required and technology should seamlessly adapt to the user’s context, preferences, and needs.”

Not that I’m a big businessman or anything, I just have this craze of being online and on-the-go! So yeah, it is a similar situation in which I have personally found myself on a number of occasions what the Ambient Network project aims at easing out. It is definitely a hassle disconnecting your existing connection and establishing your presence with the new, cheaper and definitely faster available option.

I’d like to mention here again that it is a SOFTWARE-DRIVEN infrastructure that an ambient network provides.

Still in its early days, a lot of Research and Development work is being carried out on the project. It is definitely one prospect you would like to explore more in terms of selecting your Final Year Projects for a Bachelor’s degree in Telecom Engineering.

It feels great writing my first blog entry at ZUMBEEL. As a blogger for over two years, I have witnessed the blogosphere fighting for survival and eventually cementing its place - recognized as a popular medium of expression. My passion for both Telecom and Blogging shall combine at this blog, TelecomBeat.
 
Telecom and Blogging have remained close to each other. Pakistan is no different and platforms such as these are commendable efforts indeed.

What you’ll find here at TelecomBeat will be news, reviews and updates on the Telecom Industry, advice on careers and my opinion on different issues and challenges the Telecom industry faces.
 
Telecom is fun. Telecom is for those who are passionate about it.
 
Have a Nice day!