Coming of Age

It’s been a decade since Pakistan wired up to the World Wide Web. The journey, somewhat jerky and problematic, has nonetheless been an extraordinary one. Constantly reinventing itself, Pakistan has jumped leaps and bounds to get to where it is in the internet age. With renewed investment and key structural changes, IT in Pakistan may finally be headed in the right direction.

In 1992, the World Wide Web was made public by CERN, and the rest is as they say, history. In the next two years, hundreds of thousands of new hosts were added to the internet, laying the groundwork for all e-activity across the world. As information technology (IT) swept across the world, Pakistan climbed aboard in the mid-1990s.

In 1994, two young enthusiasts from Lahore were the first Pakistanis to establish an e-mail connection to the global internet from the imran.ar.pk host. Accepting the potential of IT in Pakistan, proposals were solicited for the establishment of public e-mail services, and 16 companies were awarded licenses for internet services by the government in 1995. Almost immediately, Digicom, the first internet service provider (ISP) was connected through rooftop satellite (via a 64 kbps line), and was followed by Paknet (operated by PTCL), thereby bringing a burst of internet activity to thousands of users across Pakistan.

While Paknet was grappling with severe teething concerns related to quality of internet services in Pakistan, and Digicom started to falter with as much haste as it had arrived, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) stepped in and developed the first Pakistani e-mail service. But even with all this interest focused on the IT sector, there were several complications hampering its growth in Pakistan. On the most basic level, PTCL held a monopoly over internet gateways, and every Pakistani ISP had to connect to the global internet via an internationally leased line from a global carrier, with PTCL controlling the Pakistani end of the deal. PTCL sold several licenses in 1996, leading to an initial nine ISPs operating with 8,500 subscribers across 10 major cities, but by 1999 there was a colossal increase in both the number of ISPs and end-users, which caused a saturation of the market.

The establishment of Pak Internet Limited to manage internet-related activity in Pakistan came in 1999. By the end of the first phase of its project, there were 50,000 new dial-up internet connections in Karachi (which remains the hub of ISPs), Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar and Quetta, while rural access was practically non-existent. In January 2000, PTCL floated a tender for the creation of two network points in Islamabad and Karachi in order to block voice over IP (VoIP) traffic and access to pornography on the internet. This move was met with fury on the part of local ISPs, and was ultimately rendered useless as ISPs bypassed the restrictions by establishing overseas access points.

With an unprecedented increase in internet usage across Pakistan in 2001, PTCL linked its countrywide optical fibre ring, lowering bandwidth costs drastically (by 75 per cent) and increasing the supply manifold. It was a welcome move, but ridden with countless problems. Unreliable back circuits and imbalanced cost structures meant that if any of the optical fibres malfunctioned, thousands of users would be left without internet access.

Most commercial ISPs in Pakistan previously had no option but to use shared internet bandwidth from PTCL. But since 2002, several companies have been granted licenses to lay optic fibre networks, relaxing PTCL’s tight grip on internet services in Pakistan. In view of this, Multinet Pakistan (now a subsidiary of Telekom Malaysia) has begun laying the largest optical fibre network backbone in Pakistan.

Despite restrictions, broadband internet facilities are still available to a select few, and are provided by a handful of local ISPs such as Multinet, PakNet, Dancom and Cybernet. Nasir Ghazi Khan (the CEO of Multinet) pointed out the importance of systematic co-operation between service providers: “ISP wars are highly detrimental to the whole process. Instead of trying to push each other out, we should try to develop expertise in our particular fields. There is enormous potential for growth and diversification of ISP services, which is why Multinet chose to develop DSL broadband as opposed to cable internet”.

As a result of the IT boom, the employment sector of Pakistan was reshaped. IT education was introduced in 1990 by FAST as part of its curriculum and by 1998 COMSATS Institute of Information Technology was offering a diverse range of IT training in software engineering, web development, e-commerce and office automation. This inspired the establishment of Web development companies, graphic designing agencies and software developers. Only a few of these survived the IT slump in the late 1990s and even fewer managed to widen the scope of their services.

When Ahsan Shami began operating as a web designer in 2000, his services were amongst the first to be offered in Pakistan. He began with local clients but eventually moved on to an almost exclusively foreign client base, as there wasn’t much work within the country. “Web development for foreign clients is much more lucrative as they are becoming aware of the services provided by Pakistan-based web developers,” he pointed out. “We also need to get our hands on more clients, both local and foreign, as India has done, making them the main hub of all outsourcing in Asia”. Today, several academic institutions, health facilities, commercial businesses, and state-owned agencies, as well as smaller entrepreneurs and all media organisations (visual, print and radio) have a Web presence. This is partially a result of increased public demand and awareness of the benefits of e-services. The down side of this is that most of these websites are not regularly updated, and the services provided tend to be far from smooth or comprehensive.

Shami poses a valid question regarding the situation local Web developers are in. “Who are we creating local websites for? Who will visit them? Someone has to take the risk and develop content-related websites which offer services to targeted audiences. Also, companies need an incentive to maintain their online presence. Therefore revenue generation through websites needs particular attention, possibly through the involvement of advertising agencies, who can solicit ads and banners for a website to make it lucrative. Currently, the staying power of Pakistani websites is extremely poor, as the services they offer are not diverse or reliable enough for people to use them again and again”.

Secure servers also need to be developed as they are crucial for any activity which requires people to use credit cards online within Pakistan. “Let’s face it,” he shrugged “there is only a small percentage of people who use credit cards within Pakistan and they are wary of giving out bank details to a website. Baazzee.com (the Indian version of eBay, which is incidentally now owned by eBay) allowed people to pay with cash on receipt of items bought through bidding online. We can learn a great deal from India as they had a head start in this field. If we begin by doing what they were doing, say three or four years ago then we can eventually have the success rate they have”.

As far as Pakistani web portals are concerned, PakSearch.com, a subscription-only database, was developed with comprehensive and updated statistics and reports for the business community in Pakistan. But no one took the bait. “People don’t want to spend money to get information related to Pakistan because either they aren’t sure how reliable it is or they feel they can get it for free from somewhere else. But this approach discourages the introduction of such ventures. Why develop an in-depth set of services and information if no one will pay to use it?” Shami also feels we might have jumped the gun on providing e-banking and e-payment, “if the system doesn’t run smoothly and still requires me to chase a customer service officer, then I won’t be using the e-service again, which negates its very objective”.

On the grass-roots level, if the IT revolution is to trickle down to the masses, it must cater to the requirements of ordinary people from across the country. The importance of local software cannot be underestimated. The dominance of English content on the internet leaves a large majority of Pakistan’s population divided from the rest of the world. This brings up the need to enable information and communications technology (ICT) in consumers’ local languages. Even with the present availability of localised tools such Urdu fonts, proprietary software for Urdu on Windows XP, and commercially developed Urdu word processors, only 3.4 per cent of the population in Pakistan is using ICTs. The primary obstacle is the unavailability of relevant content for the common man and at present only one organisation, the Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP), is conducting research in computational aspects of the regional languages of Pakistan.

Statistically, the IT expansion across Pakistan paints a promising picture. Pakistan’s internet usage has grown to 2.5 million internet users with penetration at 0.9 per cent, according to current estimates of the Asia Marketing Research survey. But a large chunk of users (82 per cent) hail from the business sector, while only 18 per cent are students, professionals and home users. Almost 85 per cent of all internet subscribers hold accounts with more than one service provider as they are plagued with poor internet speeds and connectivity problems. Additionally, a review of the hardware situation shows that PC sales have considerably improved. According to figures made available by the Board of Investment (BOI), the present demand for PCs in Pakistan is approximately 123,000 units, growing at over 35 per cent annually. This has happened as a result of drastic reductions in the duties on imports of branded items. Today companies such as Inbox, Raffles and PC Viper are legally importing these items to assemble PCs locally, thereby exerting quality control.

The software situation is a little more problematic. Piracy is rampant, which presents a two-pronged dilemma – on the one hand, cheap pirate distributors make Web services accessible to the masses who would be unable to afford licensed software. On the other, using sub-standard pirated software brings with it a host of problems which limit the scope of internet usage in Pakistan.

Prices of internet services have also decreased, with the introduction of internet-cards and the ubiquitous cyber-cafes sprouting up around the country. But this is unsophisticated usage and for a nation to benefit from IT, it has to move beyond chatting and illicit internet activities. One possibility is controlling the emergence of cyber-cafes and IT training centres imparting substandard tuition and unaccredited certificates/diplomas. Rising to the challenge, Intel has developed a joint programme with the Pakistan Government in providing IT education and training (as well as equipment) across schools in Pakistan.

The situation in schools, colleges and universities across Pakistan has improved with regards to availability of internet services. The Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) was the first academic institution to develop a comprehensive website and intra-university network, and a few others have followed the lead. But this growth has not been widespread or timely enough for it to empower the students and develop their reliability on internet services.

Despite increased usage, the critical hindrance continues to be limited access to computers/internet resources across the rural sector and either a lack of relevant information or ignorance on the part of users. Therefore, the reality of “information elitism” cannot be denied. Ahsan Shami believes Pakistan has to broaden its presence on the internet, but the services on offer to local Pakistanis will be limited to those who are affluent enough to depend on them (for example, banking, ordering groceries or books online). Dr Altamash Kamal, an IT pioneer in Pakistan agrees that there is an elitism but he is quick to assert that this is natural. “Each thing, be it the IT revolution, and it is a revolution in Pakistan, has to grow at its own natural pace. I don’t think we’ve had an exceptionally difficult IT journey. But the internet at the moment does provide limited information for a select audience, and this will remain so until it infiltrates into the life of ordinary folk”. At the same time both Shami and Dr Kamal are positive about the impact of IT. “Internet related activity has spread like fire across the nation and opened up avenues for hundreds and thousands of people to be employed by the IT sector,” asserts Shami. Dr Kamal is confident that internet usage will become more sophisticated in Pakistan in the next few years. “We are certainly on the right track with respect to connection speeds, development of secure servers and micro-payment facilities for people who want to make advanced use of the internet within Pakistan.”

Bringing us up-to-date with where we stand today, Nasir Khan Ghazi discusses the importance of laying down the largest broadband network in the country. “We are choosing to focus on DSL broadband and aim to provide internet connectivity to between 75 and 100 cities with 48 strands of fibre. The key is flexibility and healthy competition and also to introduce value added services, not just provide internet to thousands of users. There are endless possibilities to how the internet could help the common man. For example, the average land cultivator in a village in Punjab. We are just trying to facilitate the process.”

As far as possibilities that have opened up for the IT sector, business process outsourcing (BPO), animation (web graphics) and call centres are some of the fields in which Pakistan can develop its infrastructure and IT labour force. Introduction of IT training in schools and community centres, establishing IT Parks, greater opportunities for IT graduates within the country (as a majority of them choose to leave for more lucrative jobs abroad) and broadening the current connectivity system (90 per cent of all users are still only based in the three major cities of Pakistan) are the routes to take. One of the key deregulation policies that has been instrumental in spurring the telecom sector on has been the issuing of three Wireless Local Loop (WLL) licenses to operators in Pakistan. The significance of this is that consumers will no longer be dependant on PTCL to get basic telephone services in their homes.