WiMAX.Pk – WiMAX portal for Pakistan

At the start of 2009, we wrote about a few setbacks for Wimax and believed this to be a make or break year for WiMAX. We were also concerned that it might not survive till 2010.

As 2009 draws to a close, Wimax is stronger than ever with 146 countries using the wireless broadband technology. Spread across these countries are 519 deployments and a whopping 30 million users for Clearwire alone (link).

Stronger global growth also spells more support by chip makers, though it may take some months into the new year before we start to see a wider array of Wimax devices.

Now for the situation in Pakistan. The future of Mobilink’s Infinity service is in doubt, though their website still announces that they exist. However, it is still limited to Karachi with no signs of reaching other cities.

Both Wateen and Wi-Tribe have sustained the downturn and are still operating in the major cities of Pakistan. Both providers have slashed their rates and continue to come up with some great new offers. Wi-Tribe now provides a unit with Wi-Fi support, as well as a USB dongle which is excellent for those on the move.

Though it may be going pretty strong globally, Wimax faces stiff competition in Pakistan where there are numerous options for Internet connectivity. At least that’s the case in the major cities.

The competition mainly comes from more readily available DSL/Fiber offerings and other wireless services, such as PTCL’s EVO. This may be offset once the devices we mentioned above hit the market, though it may take another year for this to be clear. In the meantime, enjoy the broadband.

We have just updated our wi-tribe page with their current tariffs.

Planning to try out their USB dongle service while traveling this weekend.

We at Wimax.Pakistan wish all you Pakistanis a happy 62nd Independence Day. Here’s hoping for a healthy and prosperous future. Let’s make some positive gains in every area and let ourselves be known for the better things in life.

The big news these days is how Wateen just got rid of roughly 700 employees.

That’s quite a number for an entity the size of Wateen and surprising given how much market share it has gained.

And for some reason, their site shows this “beta” logo. It isn’t clear if the portal is in beta or if it’s just the logo.

Still, hopefully they can use the savings to increase the coverage area and make their services more reliable.

They should follow Telenor Weblounge’s lead and make their subscription fully online.

Though Wi-Tribe has yet to officially launch Wimax services, it has started providing test CPEs to a lucky few who live within the areas of Islamabad covered by the service. We happen to be in one such area and were able to try it out.

Firstly, the Motorola CPE they are providing (the CPEi 750, pictured here) is a very sleek one without any protruding antennae or noisy fans (this was one of the complaints we had with Wateen’s earlier CPEs).

Signal strength varied a lot; excellent in one room, zero in another. Even at the same location, it kept switching between excellent and downright poor. To give credit to Wi-tribe, they did do some maintenance a few days ago which improved the quality.

Next, came the plug and play test. It all worked flawlessly on our Windows systems, though a laptop running Ubuntu had to have some manual tweaking done. It worked fine after specifying a DNS server manually.

That had something to do with the DHCP parameters passed by the CPE, but the Wi-Tribe support team patiently noted down the details and promised to work on the issue and try to iron it out.

Next came the test of the actual network working behind the scenes. Wi-Tribe has chosen their uplink providers carefully so we had no trouble browsing and downloading at a cool 1Mbps. That isn’t very impressive when compared to existing DSL or fiber optic offerings, but remember that we’re talking about a somewhat infamous, long-range, wireless technology.

We’ll have to wait and see how Wi-Tribe performs once they’ve launched and have to worry about such things as billing, customer support and corporate needs. For now, it looks better than the competition. Good luck with the launch.