Daniel Ritz, president and CEO of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) talks about the many innovations and advances the country’s largest ICT firm has made over the years.
Interview
Daniel Ritz, president and CEO of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) talks about the many innovations and advances the country’s largest ICT firm has made over the years.
Q: What are the innovations that PTCL has introduced in its 70 years of existence?
A: We are indeed a 70 years old company but we are young at heart. PTCL keeps evolving to meet the changing requirements of its customers with time - from a telex and telegraph organization it has changed to provide a broad range of services ranging from Voice Telephony to Internet, DigitalTV and multimedia services. Let me share some recent examples to help your readers understand the innovation part of PTCL –We have implemented the first Enterprise grade Public Cloud infrastructure in Pakistan. We are also the only organization today that has Tier-3 certified data centers in the country. These data centers are being used by major Pakistani enterprises to host their data and computing workloads. Four out of the six submarine cables connecting Pakistan to the world are operated and maintained by PTCL. On the consumer side, our partnerships with Netflix is not only first in country but also in the region. Last but not least, you may be surprised to learn that PTCL runs artificial intelligence at its contact centers to better match callers with its agents. I think I have given you some examples which show that the 70 years old company is constantly evolving and innovating for the benefit of its customers.
Q: In terms of infrastructure and equipment, what are the improvements at PTCL?
A: PTCL has been serving the country since 1947. We are well aware of the need to upgrade and modernize our infrastructure and services to meet the evolving requirements of our customers. As part of our strategy to provide reliable, resilient and fast internet services, we have embarked upon a comprehensive Network Transformation project. Top 100 local exchanges across Pakistan are being transformed end to end – which means from our technical locations all the way to customer premises. This will allow our customers to experience and enjoy reliable high speed internet. This is a long and tedious process as it requires extensive physical work. I am happy to share that to date we have upgraded and transformed 30 exchanges in different parts of Pakistan. Results are very encouraging: customer complaints in these upgraded exchanges have gone down by over 25%, the number of customers is increasing and customers are migrating to higher speeds as they can feel and experience the difference of the new and improved network.
Q: You have at some point said that PTCL’s target is to give 20 Megabits per second Internet speed to customers. What is the progress on this?
A: We fully understand and appreciate that our customers want high speed Internet. In transformed exchanges we are offering 20Mbps to everyone. We are selectively rolling out Fiber to the Home in different parts of Pakistan as per the market need and demand. In these areas our customer can enjoy up to 100Mbps. As more exchanges get upgraded over time, many of our customers will be able to experience 20Mbps and above internet speeds. It is also worth noting that the high speed Internet packages we offer to our customers are unlimited.
Q: What would you say regarding laying more fiber optics in both urban and rural areas?
A: PTCL has today by far the largest fiber footprint of all operators in the country and is well positioned as the carrier of carriers. We have signed fibre contracts with various mobile operators. This trend will continue as mobile operators keep adding sites and densify their network to deal with the ever growing mobile data volume. This can only be done by connecting these sites with fiber as microwave backhaul is no longer sufficient, for which PTCL is already working with CMOs. We are also the largest IP Bandwidth service provider to other operations. While we deploy and operate our own towers in support of our fixed wireless service we have no intention of becoming a Tower company of our own. This is a very specialized business best left to dedicated players that have recently appeared in Pakistan.
Q: How do you look at mobile broadband us fixed broadband? Lot of people are getting on internet through their phone now.
A: PTCL fixed line serves households whereas mobile phones and dongles are individual devices. With an average household size of 6-7 individuals the comparison to mobile looks different already. Secondly, the fixed line Internet customer base of PTCL keeps growing steadily and there is a lot more room for growth as today less than 10 percent of households in Pakistan have a fixed line Internet connection – one of the lowest penetrations in the world. Furthermore, we offer higher speeds in our upgraded exchanges and unlimited downloads. PTCL’s unlimited internet is economically more feasible as compared to limited or quota-based mobile internet packages for small screens. We do not see mobile broadband as a threat - rather as a catalyst to Internet proliferation. People may experience Internet for the first time on their smartphone but for meaningful usage of bandwidth hungry applications at home or in the office, they will find a WiFi or fixed broadband connection more meaningful.
Q: Do you ensure that the PTCL workforce is always up to speed regarding the services you give?
A: PTCL has 16,000+ strong team working and serving our customers across Pakistan. I am very proud to lead this team. We put special emphasis on the continuous development of our workforce. In 2017, we had over 50,000 + trainee days for our staff and 50+ projects catering to different domains encompassing both technological and behavioural aspects. We are perhaps one of the few companies that have our own training academies and centers all across Pakistan. Last but not least we were amongst the early adopters of Facebook@Work (now known as Workplace) to promote a new and social way of internal communication across all departments and regions of PTCL.
The writer is a communications professional
