Here’s your Daily Dose of Tech News from around Pakistan!

The blocking of millions unregistered connections by PTA has resulted in a decline in the phone sector growth. The overall customer’s base reached 95.918 million, only 0.01 percent growth from preceding month. Because of the downfall in revenues, most of the telecom companies have adopted “cost-cutting measure”. Despite these difficulties, the sectors revenue grew by 19 percent with a FDI worth $3.7 billion altogether. Investment opportunities exist in huge areas like Broadband, WLL and manufacturing.

The Task Force on Information Technology and Communication Technologies (ICT) has recommended the federal government to incorporate the IT policy in the national trade policy. The Task Force Chairman Salim Ghauri, said that the government had formed Task Force on ICT to place Pakistan as a major player in software exports. He added, “The IT industry exports have touched to the magical figure of $1 billion and ways and means are needed to be explored to encourage the IT companies for reporting their exports earnings to the SBP.” Whatever the Task Force on IT has to say, it might be helpful if they said it through their website (which doesn’t seem to exist!)

Despite of privatization in 2006, the performance of PTCL has faced a decline in performance. For this Syed Najam Ali, Senior Manager and Kamran Mahmood, GM of Corporate and Services, met KCCI President Abdul Majeed Haji Muhammad and other members. The KCCI suggested to the PTCL to open a ‘Helpdesk’ at the chamber in case members intend to have duplicate bills and any issues regarding rectification of faulty telephone lines and other services.

Warid Telecom (Pvt.) Ltd. has achieved another milestone by hitting 6,250 destinations, expanding the quality services to 486 cities, covering more than 12,500Km road length throughout Pakistan; crossing over 18.58 million with a market share of 19.37%. It has pursued its aggressive strategy to spread its network across Pakistan, and also internationally, covering 70% of the world including Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia.

Faysal Asset Management has selected Sidat Hyder solutions to replace its existing software for Mutual Funds. Sidat Hyder solution offers a comprehensive integrated suite for Investment Management (iPaMs), and ERP-for-ALL (Financials) application suite.

Since a major portion of the infrastructure is owned by the PTCL and is reluctant to share it, therefore, the other service providers have to build their own infrastructure, which is an immense waste of national resources. Unless ministry of IT plays an effective role along with the PTA, broadband penetration in Pakistan is like to be slow. In Pakistan, there are about 485,000 subscribers, which, in term of density, is only 0.26% of the world’s broadband growth rate. Despite of all the difficulties, USF plans to achieve 1% broadband penetration by 2010.

The Provincial Government of Punjab has taken the great step of establishing computer labs in schools to make every student fully computer literate. It has established computer labs in 4286 schools, each equipped with 15 seats comprising three desktops PCs and 12 NComputing virtual desktops imparting training to over three million students annually. Through this project, Punjab government will save nearly Rs. 1.8 billion in up-front and Rs.10 million per month in ongoing costs which translates into more than 360 million over the project life of three years. The decision to deploy this IT labs project makes the Punjab government as an innovator in educational computing in Pakistan and a model for other governments.

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