Call to accelerate broadband penetration

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 percent in the country. The other countries in the region enjoys broadband penetration rate from 8 to 50 percent.
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 capitalise 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 up to 450,000 connections by July 2006. The cost of l00kbs bandwidth should be less than 1 percent 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 percent in Korea, 56 percent in China, 32 percent in Taiwan and 6 percent in India.
In 1999, broadband subscribers in South Korea were one in 100 persons. By end of 2004, they achieved broadband connectivity of 98 percent, 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 popu1ation 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.