The broadband penetration in Pakistan is currently less than 1 percent in the country. The other countries in the region enjoy broadband penetration rate from 8 percent to 50 percent. President Inetrnet Service Providers and Chief Operating Officer, Cybernet Ansarul Haq stated this while talking to newsman here.
He said Pakistan should also grow fast as part of the global information society and capitalize on the opportunities we have in the call centre and Business process outsourcing industry.
"For bringing change, equal access for all through e-access, nurturing human capital by E-learning, E- government, promoting tourism by E- culture, E- business, E- health and Promoting Investment by Exporting ICT will be the core change agents for proliferation of the broadband in Pakistan, he said.
He said in India, its 2002 Planning Commission would target 35 million subscribers by 2007 and 2004 Broadband Policy 40 million subscribers by 2010, while here in Pakistan, none of the National Development Plan mentioned Internet, while 2004 Broadband Policy envisaged 200,000 Broadband expansion per year.
"There are 2.4 million Internet users in Pakistan as compared to India, 6 million and China 100 million. In India, broadband connections were only 49,000 till December 2004, while it has grown up to 450,000 connections by July 2005.
The cost of 100kbps bandwidth should be less than 1 percent of average monthly income of the Internet user, for which strong commitment from the government is needed," he stressed.
He said high quality large capacity backbone networks were vehicles for broadband to carry seamless domestic and international broadband traffic, while local loop DSL, cable, satellite-DTH, VSAT, Terrestrial wireless-WiFi, Wi-Max etc, Fiber to the home, building or community should be encouraged.
For effective competition, each of these access path technologies must co-exist without artificial hurdles including licensing and inter-connect conditions, he added.
The countries, which have succeeded, have diminished the difference in the number of subscribers between narrow-band and broadband. Broadband subscribers in percentage of Internet Subscribers till June 2005 was 98 percent in Korea, 56 percent in China, 32 percent in Taiwan and 6 percent in India.
In 1999, broadband subscribers in South Korea were one in 100 people. By end of 2004, they achieved broadband connectivity of 98 percent covering almost the entire Internet population, while India is also following the same model, he mentioned.
There are interesting broadband scenarios in the world. Hong Kong has a population of 6.8 million including 2.2 million households. There are 1.2 million (1.1 million household) broadband connections, 14 DSL lines per 100 population, and 28 DSL lines per 100 telephone lines.
In Japan broadband was driven by content for different age groups. In Korea broadband is driven significantly by local content.
In India, currently broadband is driven by Entertainment: Interactive TV, time-shift TV, video on demand, music on demand, multi-player gaming, education at home, internet shopping and of course net browsing and data transfer.
The government focus was on BPO for broadband acceleration there. In Malaysia, BB is growing at 30K new subscribers per month. In India, BB is growing at 55K new subscribers per month, he told.
Mr. Ansarul Haq said over 80 percent international bandwidth was used for Internet and over 50 percent domestic bandwidth for Internet worldwide.
Broadband access is the key behind continuous development of technologies like DSL, cable modem, wi-fi, Wimax, 3G/4G etc. and though internet was a global system, but its beauty and efficiency lie in keeping the traffic as local as possible.
Pricing, QOS, infrastructure sharing (co-location), content development and regulation are the major issues.
Pakistan Broadband Policy was announced in November 2004 and arbitrary un-announced tariff hike was made by PTCL by 700 percent for domestic connectivity in December 2004 that clearly shows lack of coordination among different departments.
In the revised tariff the Intl. DS3 price is mentioned as $31,348 / month and with the same tariff structure the pricing for the STM1 should have been 31,348 x 2 = 62,696 USD/month. The PTCL has fixed it to be $76,000. In other words, the bulk purchaser has been put to a disadvantage of $ 13,304 per month. The broadband is all about affordable capacities, he maintained.
Quelle: Online - International News Network, 31.08.2005
