All of Pakistan to have fibre access | Bangkok Post: tech

Pervez Iftikhar, CEO of Pakistan's Universal Service Fund, spoke of the progress that has been made.

Iftikhar told how his wife took a picture of a dress on her mobile to show her semi-literate tailor and told him she wanted it in a different colour and told him to look carefully and remember it. The tailor asked her: "Sister, do you have Bluetooth?"

The fund identifies unserved areas of the countries and carves them up into blocks of "Mauzas" (one to three villages). In the province of Balochistan, out of 60,000 Mauzas, 12,000 are unserved.

Problems are not just about lack of telecommunications infrastructure, but of power and weather.

"We have made it our obligation that every base station that gets our funding must use alternative energy; solar or wind," he said. "It is not just a matter of being green but of the hassle of refuelling sites with diesel."

Thirty percent of the country lacks fibre. Wiring up the country has been divided into 11 projects, four of which have been commissioned. The goal is for all areas of the country to have access to fibre by 2011, replacing the current use of expensive long microwave links or even satellite.

Rohan Samarajiva, CEO of Lirne-Asia, has been a long opponent of USO funds and has often stated that they are a waste of money which distort the market, and that USO-type projects should be funded from central budgeting process instead.

However, Samarajiva makes an exception for Pakistan which has succeeded in pushing out USO funds. Other countries are good at collecting money, but not spending. $4 billion (130 billion baht) is locked up in USO funds in Brazil and an equal amount again in India. Seventy five percent of the USO money is stuck in governments, unspent.

The Pakistani model is different as it has private participation in its governance model. Iftikhar said that 50 percent of his board is from private operators and the charter is such that the board is not complete if even one of the private sector members is absent.

The USO is also registered as a company rather than part of the regulator, which makes the decision-making process much faster.

Finally, the USO contribution is just 1.5 percent, compared to the usual 5-6 percent of other countries.