By Muhammad Yasir

KARACHI: The cellular phone companies have been incurring losses on the blockage of Internet services to their customers having blackberry handsets.

The suspension of the Internet services on the blackberry is likely to cause financial losses to the operators as the subscribersÂ’ utility have been ceased.

Though the number of cellular phone subscribers is very limited in Pakistan, however, they are very potential and revenue-generated mostly belonging to corporate sector, business class and high-income group.

The total numbers of customers having blackberry handsets are not reported by cellular phone companies and telecom regulator but they are increasing on every network.

Officials said the customers need high application requirement carrying expensive handsets. Their use of multiple services is high and frequent, hence profitable for operators as their Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is relatively high.

The Internet services on blackberry have been suspended after cellular phone operators took action to block facebook on the directives of telecom regulator on Wednesday.

Sources in the telecom sector told that cellular phone companies have asked its network support partner Rim to block facebook URL on blackberry phone set for the customers yesterday. The Internet services were completely off from 11.30pm on Wednesday to 6 am on the other day.

Nonetheless companies’ official had approached Rim, the manufacturer and network support partner, for the restoration of Internet services other than facebook website but their request were rejected outright.

Later, the email and chat services were made functional after negotiations between cellular phone operator and Rim — a Canadian firm, but entire browsing services were suspended.

Cellular phone companies have also blocked restricted sites on the other handsets besides blackberry. Most of them have completely shut their Internet GPRS services as the number of objectionable websites was on the rise. Analysts said the Internet browsing is very limited on blackberry and other handset but majority of the customer use facebook and twitter on their handset.

The blockage of Internet services also cause losses to facebook and twitter, as the cellular phone customers are 24-hours visitors of their websites using cheap services. The cellular phone operators discontinued their advertisement services to facebook and compensated their losses through curtailing service promotion expenses.
Source: Daily Times
Date:5/22/2010