The story begins in 1947 when there was not even a single telecom company of Pakistan. If we look back in the history from 1947 till now, the 'land of pure - Pakistan' has gone through a monopolistic telecom & IT vendor's age. In this whole epoch, the telecom sector broadened up considerably and covered many cities of Quaid's nation. From analog to digital, the voyage of Pakistan's telecom industry is very interesting. It was British raj (rule) before 1947, but after that we became independent in our decisions and future planning for every sector and industry. Unluckily in this whole phase, a range of multinational telecom services providing companies sold their equipment at a very high price and monopolistic agreements were made with the newly born 'Telephone and Telegraph' (T&T) - presently known as PTCL. Even now, one can say that body (telecom structure) is our own, but the blood that's circulating (equipment) is of someone else. We in all these years were governed and remained slaves to many foreign multinational vendors especially of the west.

Yes! There is hardly any telecom equipment you can call 'Made in Pakistan'. Germany is famous for its widely used EWSD switches while France is running Alcatel. China has various IT and telecom companies now. Huawei and ZTE are the top notch Chinese names in the telecom scene. Japan is proud of their NEC and Americans are known from their modems, routers and operating systems. This is only because of their enormous research in the field of IT & telecom. We have kept buying their technology as operators but never became a vendor in this field until today. Although these telecom vendors have done a great job in making the telecom infrastructure stronger, we remained their slaves because we don't have any worth mentioning equipment of our own. Equipments are in the market with 'Made in this' and 'Made in that' labels. Where is 'Made in Pakistan'? We can save billions of dollars by having our own equipment as a direct result of research and development in this field.

The IT & Telecom industry which may generate 5 to 6 billion US dollars in coming years as predicted by the telecom analysts is progressing in the right direction. Government has done a great job in bringing huge investments to Pakistan especially in the telecom sector. There are many engineering and sciences universities in the country which are breeding engineers of future in various disciplines of IT and Telecom. There is a huge potential in our nation which can be effectively utilized in IT & Telecom sector and hence contributed towards the overall economic growth. We should now seriously start research in these fields as we have the brains and professional force. It is encouraging to know that many good educational institutes under the supervision of Higher Education Commission (HEC) are now doing research in various fields. HEC should now also support telecom research as it has become need of the hour.

We should try not to become solely dependant on any of these telecom service vendors and other multinational companies in future. If we work hard and start practical and result oriented research in the field of IT & Telecom, we may win and get rid of monopoly created by vendors and come out of the slavery in this field. By researching in this sector we may become able to win the market of less developed countries of Asia and Africa. Who knows we might start competing other developed countries by our equipment with 'made in Pakistan' label for it's reliability, accuracy and good standards. Educational institutes, software & hardware houses, telecom companies and investors should come up and work together to achieve the targets for a bright future of Pakistan in technology.

Its not just about telecom switches or computer hardware, there are other interesting fields like encryption, decryption, signals processing, wireless services, sensory communication and many other undiscovered ways of fast & reliable communication. IT & Telecom industry has many domains to research on and explore new horizons for a nation like us to feel proud of what we can do for the generations to come.

The writer is student of M.Sc Telecom in Federal Urdu University of Arts, Sciences &Technology (FUUAST), Islamabad. He keeps an eye on Pakistan's telecom industry & writes frequently on different domains of IT & Telecommunications. E-mail: imran@itinsight.info