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FREE Internet for all PTCL landline customers

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Islamabad: Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) has decided to offer free internet service to all its customers, effective from October 18, 2008.

Dr Sadik Al-Jadir, SEVP Commercial stated," With this perspective, PTCL, the largest IP service provider in Pakistan now brings a revolutionary offer for all its landline subscribers which is unmatched anywhere in the world.

At PTCL Dr. Sadik said "we strive to create value for our customers. We put value creation first and pursue it with a passion to achieve excellence and facilitate our customers".
Effective October 18th, 2008, all our landline subscribers will have dial-up internet services free of charge.

All PTCL landline subscribers can now experience the best dial up speeds with unlimited internet usage during night hours from 10:00pm to 07:00am. Furthermore subscribers can also avail up to 100 hours of free dialup internet on monthly basis from 0:700 am to 10:00pm every day.

In order to access the internet our subscriber can simply dial 131-77777 with "ptcl" as login and password.

From October 18th, 2008, PTCL customers availing unlimited dial up internet package of Rs. 199/month will not be charged anymore. However, customer exceeding 100 hr of free internet during day time will be charged as per existing tariff of PTCL dial up internet at Rs. 6/h.

In addition, PTCL is also shifting customers of value plus (Rs. 75/month for 20 hrs of dial up internet) to basic plus which has no additional charges effective from 1st November 2008.

Dr. Sadik also added, "We at PTCL can do this since we have the best IP network infrastructure and the associated international internet connectivity capable of supporting a very large user base. Hence serving the aspirations of Pakistan to join the leading countries of the world in internet penetration and usage"

We will also be replacing our existing promotional offers with new offers on regular basis to create more value for customers.
In this connection, this Free Internet offer has replaced our limited time (3 months) free local calls promotion allowing free local calls between 11pm to 6am which has ended in October.

The Half Rate Sundays' promotion is another value addition to the PTCL landline which offers half rates on all local, nationwide and mobile calls made on Sundays. This promotion is effective from October 5, 2008.

Dr. Sadik stated that 'PTCL continues to strive to serve our customers better by creating value and shall soon be marketing more innovative and attractive products and offers in the future'



Alcatel-Lucent | Planning and Deploying the 3G/UMTS Network

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The telecommunications marketplace is changing rapidly, placing increasing emphasis on providing consumers with personalized lifestyle services and mobility. There has been an explosion in the availability of sophisticated user devices that support integrated voice, data, and video applications. According to a UMTS Forum white paper, at the end of 2006 consumers had a choice of more than 400 WCDMA terminal designs worldwide representing handsets optimized for voice, video, and other multimedia services.1 UMTS also estimates that worldwide 3G subscribers will exceed 275 million by the end of 2007. By the end of the decade, the total of global 3G WCDMA subscribers should approach 800 million.

Driving consumer acceptance and increased demand are new features such as high resolutions screens, multi-megapixel cameras with quality optics, fast USB and WiFI connectivity, and large amounts of removable storage capacity such as compact flash, memory sticks, and other formats that can store gigabytes of music, pictures, and videos. The business market is equally active with handsets equipped with business-oriented operating systems, keyboards for text entry, and PDA handhelds that are moving into the territory that was once exclusively held by notebook PCs. 3G/UMTS will make possible a whole new range of mobile data applications such as telemedicine, electronic banking, and location-based services.
Mobile TV, video, and music are three hot new services. Better phones with high resolution screens featuring large color palettes, combined with improved power management, are helping drive the demand for mobile TV, a premiere applications based on 3G/UMTS-based services. Mobile video is another killer application — witness the number of video clips created on mobile devices that are posted daily to YouTube. And mobile music — downloading songs to your mobile device — although currently accounting for only a small percentage of service provider ARPU, is growing rapidly.
All of this activity presents service providers with great opportunities — and some formidable challenges as well.
Alcatel-Lucent studies indicate that customers are increasingly looking to bundle their various communications services and have no qualms about switching if their provider is unable to offer a whole range of new 3G services backed up by high levels of quality of service (QoS). This means service providers have to present their subscribers with a top notch service experience and QoS for content-based services, while, at the same time, re-engineering their operations to significantly increase service velocity. To achieve this goal they must be able to cost-effectively manage the migration to 3G/UMTS.

Planning and Deploying the 3G/UMTS Network
In order to take advantage of the rapidly growing market for new converged mobile services, operators need to not only deploy UMTS, but to make sure that the 3G service is integrated with its existing 2G GSM network. In working with its service provider customers, Alcatel-Lucent has employed a variety of techniques to bring their UMTS clusters (a group of 20~25 contiguous NodeBs) to acceptable performance status within a significantly compressed time line. Key areas addressed by he deployment teams include:
• RF Design;
• RNC planning and configuration;
• Initial neighbor list – UMTS;
• Initial neighbor list – IRAT; and
• Drive route and cluster definition and 3rd party audit of antenna installation

RF Design

Fundamental to a successful UMTS deployment is an excellent design that has as its foundation high quality geographic data and accurate signal propagation models. Developing the right propagation models is essential — failure to do so can compromise the entire deployment. 3G networks demand rigorous precision;
A hefty percentage of the initial design time — in some cases, a month or longer — can be expended in identifying the right sites in the target market area. This essential preliminary work includes gathering, sorting, and tuning data in order to simulate actual market conditions in the target area and develop accurate propagation models assigned to the appropriate cells or sectors in both the 3G and 2G spectrums. Continuous wave (CW) tests performed over both spectrums (for example, at 1900 and 850 MHz) ensure the validity of the UMTS and GSM propagation models.

Understanding WiMAX and 3G for Portable/Mobile Broadband Wireless

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Introduction

Although the broadband data market segment has been
rather anemic for the past couple decades, declining
average revenue per user has caused carriers to look at
wireless broadband data as a means to drive revenue
growth. While growth of low-bandwidth applications
such as downloading ring tones and SMS are
experiencing sharp growth, the growth of broadband
data applications such as email and downloading/
uploading files with a laptop computer or PDA has been
slow. Primary inhibitors of portable broadband services
have included service price, slow data speed and spotty
coverage.
Early Wide Area Network Technologies (WAN) such as
General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) offered average
throughput speeds of 10 Kbps, which was far too slow
for user satisfaction. In 2003, carriers began deploying
services such as Enhanced Data rates for Global
Evolution (EDGE), which delivers average speeds of
100-130 Kbps and bursty traffic up to 200 Kbps. Code
Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technologies such as
1xEvDO provide average speeds of ~300–400 Kbps
with bursts up to 700 Kbps; EVDV boosts these speeds
even higher.[5]
Recent research from In-Stat/MDR* (4/04)[5] indicates
that laptop computers are becoming the access devices
of choice for broadband wireless data. Personal
productivity applications such as email, address books,
calendars, and internet browsers, are among the top
applications used.
While many service providers and operators may be
somewhat familiar with the previously mentioned 2.5G
services, they are now hearing about newer 3G
technologies such as UMTS and HSDPA, and other
technologies such as WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e), which
offer substantial improvements in data rate and spectral
efficiency. This paper focuses on the technical
differences between these technologies by comparing
the differences between the modulation techniques
used in CDMA and OFDMA.



Technology Overview

WCDMA

Wideband Code Division Multiple Access uses Direct
Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) to spread the
signal over a 5 MHz spectrum. It is based on 3GPP
Release 99 and provides data rates of 384 Kbps for
wide area coverage and up to 2 Mbps for hot-spot
areas. In addition to the use of orthogonal spreading
codes, it uses Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK)
for its modulation.

High Speed Downlink Packet Access
(HSDPA) Overview

WCDMA 3GPP Release 5 extends the WCDMA
specification with High Speed Downlink Packet Access
(HSDPA). HSDPA adds a new transport channel, the
high-speed downlink shared channel (HS-DSCH),
which is optimized for shared data. It also provides
higher-order modulation (Quadrature Amplitude
Modulation or QAM), short transmission time interval
(TTI), fast link adaptation, fast scheduling, and fast
hybrid automatic-repeat-request (ARQ).

WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e)

The portable version of WiMAX, IEEE 802.16e utilizes
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Access
(OFDM/OFDMA) where the spectrum is divided into
many sub-carriers. Each sub-carrier then uses QPSK or
QAM for modulation. For more on the basics of OFDM,
refer to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing.



IP Telephony

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What is IP Telephony?
The public Internet, of course, is the best-known example of an IP network. In IP networks, information is digitized and transmitted as a stream of packets over a digital data network. IP networks allow each packet to independently find the most efficient path to the intended destination, thereby best using the network resources at any given instant. The packets associated with a single source may thus take many different paths to the destination in traversing the network. At the destination, however, the packets are re-assembled and converted back into the original signal. Cost efficiencies arise because of the superior utilization of the network as it shares traffic among many sources.
IP telephony is the collection of technologies that emulates and extends today's circuit-switched
telecommunications services to operate on packet-switched data networks based on the Internet Protocol (IP). Defined in this way, IP telephony encompasses these technologies and extends those capabilities even further to include new telecommunications applications made possible by the convergence of voice and data.
The data carried by an IP network can be as simple as transactional queries and responses or as
complex as broadband multimedia services. In particular, the technology of IP telephony supports all the functions of voice communications, fax communications, routing, authorization, authentication,
accounting, billing, and network management that are now provided by the PSTN. In addition, IP
Telephony will allow the PSTN to function directly with other networks and products. With set standards, Internet Telephony supplies the framework for the integration of computer and voice networks to enable a range of new services, including Virtual Private Networks, Unified Messaging, and Web-enabled Calls. IP Telephony is flexible enough to provide unlimited new services, allowing it to reach into every corner of the globe.
The IP Telephony Network it is widely accepted and acknowledged by the communications industry and industry analysts as a whole, that the Internet Protocol (IP) will become the universal transport of the future. The rapid adoption and migration of both service providers and vendors to the utilization of IP as a transport for data, voice, and video applications further endorses this transition to a converged networking paradigm. This includes those networks that have historically used time-division multiplexing (TDM) infrastructures and relied upon "old world" practices.
The IP Telephony networks seen today are still expanding and evolving. In many ways, any large-scale network today still has some dependency on the PSTN. The PSTN network may be used as an access or termination point to the IP Telephony network, the intelligence that is stored in the global SS7 networks may be used to help with call processing and routing within the IP Telephony network, or the PSTN network may still provide some services currently not available in the products of today. But the products that are now starting to emerge offer not only the features of the PSTN network with greater capability and efficiency, but brand new ideas that will bring new heights to the telecommunications of the world.

Gateway is used to originate and terminate calls with the PSTN, controlled by the Call Agent. The Call Agent also has the capability to connect to a Signaling Transport Point (STP) on the PSTN network, terminating the SS7 signaling. When interfacing with SS7, the Call Agent uses the Media Gateway to interface with the SS7 voice paths.
The Gatekeeper is used to manage all routing and call control within the node. All IP call signaling must travel through the Gatekeeper so that routing and network configuration stays centrally managed.
The IVR and Call Accounting server are used to provide back-office support to the node. By using the
IVR to prompt callers for relevant information, the network provides a quick and efficient interface for the caller to enter an account number, the destination number, etc. The Call Accounting server then stores each call transaction in a database, as well as performing balance tracking, account validation, call tracking, pre/post-paid calling services, and detailed records for all calls within the network.
With the idea of an IP Telephony Network replacing a PSTN network, it becomes paramount for Networks to be able to interoperate, including be able to exchange traffic, information, and “roaming” services.
Each network must also maintain security and protection against loss of service. Using Encryption and
using private security keys, it becomes possible for each endpoint to know the exact identity of any other endpoint.


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