Public-private partnership urged to accelerate broadband penetration
By Ali Imran

ISLAMABAD—The Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan (ISPAK) on Saturday called for need of public-private partnership to accelerate the broadband penetration which is currently less than 1 per cent in the country.
The other countries in the region enjoys broadband penetration rate from 8 to 50 per cent. Public-private partnership as access owner, service and content provider should be encouraged and an enabling environment for private sector including private data gateways be created in order to accelerate the broadband penetration in the country.
President (ISPAK) and Chief Operating Officer of Cybernet, Ansarul Haq said this while talking newsmen here.
He said the country should grow fast as part of the global information society and capitalize on the opportunities we have in the call centre and business process out-sourcing industry.
"For bringing change, equal access for all through E-Access, nurturing human capital by E-Learning, government now delivers by E-government, promoting tourism by E-culture, changing the face of business by E-business, better health services for citizens by E-health and promoting investment by exporting ICT will be the core change agents for the proliferation of the broadband in Pakistan," he added.
He said 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 upto 450,000 connections by July 2006. The cost of 100kbs bandwidth should be less than 1 per cent of average monthly income of the Internet users, for which strong commitment from the government is needed," he stressed. Ansarul Haq 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-Maz and 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.
He said broadband subscribers in percentage of Internet subscribers till June 2005 was 98 per cent in Korea, 56 per cent in China, 32 per cent in Taiwan and 6 per cent in India. In 1999, broadband subscribers in South Korea were one in 100 persons. By end of 2004, they achieved broadband connectivity of 98 per cent, covering almost the entire Internet population, while India is also following the same model, he said.
There are interesting broadband scenarios in the world. Hong Kong has a population of 6.8 million including 2.2 million household. There are 1.2 million (1.1 million household) broadband connections, 14 DSL lines per 100 population, 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.
Ansarul Haq said over 80 per cent international bandwidth was used for Internet and over 50 per cent domestic bandwidth for Internet worldwide.
Broadband access is the key behind continuous development of technologies like DSL, cable modem, Wi-Fi, Wimax and 3G/4G, and though Internet was a global system, but its beauty and efficiency lie in keeping the traffic as local as possible.
Pricing, quality of service, infrastructure sharing (co-location), content development and regulation are the major issues.
Pakistan's Broadband Policy was announced in November 2004 and arbitrary un-announced traffic hike was made by PTCL by 700 per cent for domestic connectivity in December 2004 that clearly shows lack of coordination among different departments.
In the revised tariff, the DS3 price is mentioned as US Dollar 31,348/month and with the same tariff structure the pricing for the STM1 should have been 31,348 x 2 = 62,696 USD/mont while PTCL has fixed it to be US Dollar 76,000. In other words, the bulk purchaser has been put to a disadvantage of US Dollar 13,304/month.The broadband is all about affordable capacities, he added.