I get asked this question frequently – What is the best ISP in Karachi?
My recommendation to everyone these days is Maxcom. It’s a Karachi only ISP at the time being, but has great service and prices. I’ve switched to Maxcom, was happy with CyberDSL, but Maxcom is much cheaper now, and has good service too. Cybernet remains good, but at the present moment they’re priced themselves out of the consumer market.
The next question everyone asks is why not PTCL or Link.net, the two most aggressive ISP’s in Pakistan in respect to pricing and advertising.
I wouldn’t ever get a PTCL DSL connection regardless of price because their after sales technical support is slow. Uptime is far more important to me than speed, so I’d rather have a slower connection with better service. Link.net, while better than PTCL also suffers from the too much growth too fast problem. Continue reading ‘Internet Recommendation for Karachi, April 2008’
A few days ago PKNIC, the registrar for .pk domains, terminated the domain name djuice.pk without informing it’s owner, and transferred it to Telenor, who has a trademark by the same name.
In another country they would have to contact you first, and would have probably bought it from you for millions. This is a reason I never buy any .pk domains (though I do own a few, but use them as a backup, not the primary). Registering a trademark does not give you ownership of the same name in other spaces!
There are many things wrong with PKNIC – it charges a lot more than other registrars, they never respond to emails, it’s hard to make payments, heck they lose checks mailed to them or take a month to process them – overall it’s all bad vibes, as this particular case confirms. The email is quoted below in full: Continue reading ‘One more reason to avoid .pk domains’
The cellphone is dead, long live the smartphone! In all fairness, despite the advent of the iphone and the many Windows mobile devices, the smartphone is not quite there yet.
After three years of running pretty uneventfully, this has been a pretty bad month for the website! First, wiredpakistan got banned by the PTA, then a few hours back today it got hacked!
Whoever it was, wiped out the entire database, and then… left. Didn’t even bother to say anything. It takes time to break into a forum… if a normal user or person did it I’m sure they would have left some sort of message or something – the fact that whoever did it just left it blank raises a red flag in my mind.
The current status: The last backup I had was too soon… by the time I found out, the ‘cracked’ version had been backed up – so at the moment I have no backup. My host is casting around for older backup as I type, and hopefully it exists. It doesn’t exist! Continue reading ‘Forums Hacked’
Numerous websites around the world reported earlier this week that Pakistan had blocked Youtube. This in itself is not news, as Pakistan regularly blocks websites, but what is interesting is the manner in which they blocked it – managing to take down Youtube for the entire world!
The BBC News website’s technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan’s citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom “hijacked” the web server address of the popular video site.
...A leading net professional told BBC News: “This was probably a simple mistake by an engineer at Pakistan Telecom. There’s nothing to suggest this was malicious.”
IP hijacking involves taking over a web site’s unique address by corrupting the internet’s routing tables, which direct the flow of data around the world.
Industry professionals have been moaning about the Pakistan Internet Exchange for years about how incompetent they are, and this last issue really underlines that. PIE still has not managed to perform it’s primary function of establishing a working local internet exhange in Pakistan, and in the meantime goes about incompetently trying to block websites.
I run a popular travel website on Pakistan, offroadpakistan.com, along with a website on “all things tech” in Pakistan, wiredpakistan.com. They’re both hosted on the same server, and on Feb 3rd, the PTA ordered them blocked. I contacted a couple of ISP’s, and found out from them that my websites were being blocked at the Pakistan Internet Exchange, through which most Pakistan’s internet bandwidth is filtered. Continue reading ‘My personal brush with censorship’
This website is now on the PTA list of blocked websites, and is being blocked at the PIE servers, so you might not be able to access it from certain ISP’s in Pakistan which are routed through PIE. Discussion is ongoing at the forums here.
The possible reasons for censoring this particular website – none really, though there is a lot of criticism of PTCL, Wateen, PTA, and a few other local internet companies, but nothing out of the extraordinary.
I’m reposting an earlier article on internet censorship which I’d written but never posted here before, which explains how the government tries to censor the internet in Pakistan.
Of interest is that the report says Wateen Telecom’s Wimax network can support 1 million plus users, making it the largest Wimax deployment in the world – and that it is expected to launch at the end of this year.
At the present moment, Pakistan has about 79,000 broadband users – which for a country of almost 170 million remains staggeringly low. Many of these 70,000 broadband users are on 128kbps bandwidth limited connections, which isn’t broadband, as the PTA report itself points out.
My own estimate is that the true number of broadband connections in Pakistan is a fourth of PTA’s number – this is the generous estimate, and could be as low as a sixth of PTA’s number. So we’re looking at only 13,000 to 20,000 broadband connections in Pakistan! On the bright side, the report estimates that there will be 5 million broadband connections by 2010.
My office is in the beginning of Korangi, which is Karachi’s (and hence Pakistan’s) premiere industrial area. Email and the internet are a essential part of any business, and thus to ensure reliable internet connectivity we’ve got eight different internet links. Eight, you might ask incredulously, but that is the sad truth.
The 
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