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the-south-asian.com July / August 2006 |
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August/September Contents
Sufis - wisdom against 50
years of mountain Heritage cities:
Cotton - the fibre of
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Page
2 of 10 Telecom & Software - Trends & Future in South Asia
(cntd.) by
First
published in December 2001
Telecom Raj - Bitter Harvest of Ignorance
.
The
Telecom sector in India and Pakistan has consisted of the sole monopoly of
the industry in the public sector / government bureaucrats' hands. These in
turn were dominated by European Telephone Switch manufacturers monopolies -
primarily Siemens , Alcatel, Ericsson.
Policies such as the prevention of putting Fax machines on the telephone
lines were in effect upto1980 in Pakistan. Small business telephone
exchanges were not allowed to be used without permission from the Telecom
authorities. Ironically when Fax machines were allowed in Pakistan , Telecom
revenues jumped as trade related Fax traffic with Japan and the West
exploded. Yet
in 1994 An Engineer in the Lahore Telecom Circle was not aware that a modem
could be used on a telephone line to transmit data.
The
last stand of these bodies is the prevention of the Internet Telephony
technology called Voice over Internet Protocol [ VO-IP]. This technology is
still being resisted as it would eat into the major portion of the
International long-distance revenues of the South Asian National PTTs. In
1995 a call from Lahore to Karachi cost the same as a call to London , U.K..
Long distance revenues were used by PTTs in South Asian countries to
subsidise local calls. Again the situation is similar to the banning of Fax
machines - lack of foresight , vision that volumes are the key to a business
that is a commodity now.
Similarly in the case of the allocation and selling of the wireless spectrum
, arguments are still given by these Institutions about the national defence
and security issues in an age when the introduction of encryption
technologies makes nonsense of this line of reasoning. Valuable wealth
making opportunities are being lost as time goes by and mindless ignorant
and backward looking officials avoid making changes that can release our
people from poverty and offer hope and opportunity very much as Grameen
Telecom has done in Bangladesh. [ see The-South_Asian ---- issue ]
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