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A recent article that I wrote for CIO Pakistan

I was recently assigned to work on a project for a financial institution in Pakistan and had to travel to Karachi for a few days. For someone who is so plugged into the system, travel outside the comfort of the digitally integrated world, always proves to be an interesting experience. Keeping this in mind, I thought I’d share a technology perspective of the trip – I’m not sure that some of these things are known by people who live there, which is why it makes for an interesting write up. So here we go!

Landing in Karachi
I whisked through immigration which, surprisingly is quite simple, and was driven to my hotel. As I approached the front desk at least 4 different individuals, 3 behind the front desk and 1 lady in a sari, moved forward to greet me, talking to me in sync, often interfering waveforms with one another. I was promptly carted over to my room with the thrilling announcement of free internet access!

Life was, as they say, set! My first instinct when I settled into my room was to get online. The first thing that shocked me was a long list of wireless SSIDs shown on my MacBook Pro. Upon closer inspection, I found that the room numbers were suffixed with the SSIDs – it seemed that every room had a Wireless Access Point! I connected to the SSID of my room, continuing to be amused at the configuration that was so apparent on my screen. Some sales guy had made oodles of cash by selling the Cisco Linksys APs at the expense of insanely overlapping the wireless spectrums, something that critically affects the network performance. A professional site survey done before the installation of wireless APs would have considerably cut down the hardware cost, as well as provided a higher performance wireless network, where lesser is better.

WIFI, as we know it, is designed so that the kind of configuration the hotel was doing, wouldn’t be needed. By having so many overlapping devices instead of creating a redundant connection ecosystem, the frequencies were actually quite literally fighting one another for spectrum, hence creating a slower browsing experience than intended.

I did need to frequently transfer my wireless login credentials between my laptop and iPhone, which I wanted to use in the hotel restaurant so I could stay connected to my corporate exchange server, but that was where the transfer of connectivity and hassle thankfully ended. The hotel also provides a desktop installed with a Windows XP operating system, which was directly connected to the LAN port of the Cisco Linksys wireless router, and perhaps that is why there are so many devices, but it would have been more economical for the hotel to have separate hardware for wired and its wireless devices. What I bet the desktop was not configured to do was to be set up and connected to the printer in, let’s say, the Business Center, or other Wireless-enabled devices which would have made this experience a complete 360 business one, but like I said, I didn’t try it and therefore can’t be judgmental on the subject.

For those who might be interested, using the telephone in a hotel is more expensive than making a phone call from 30,000 feet. As I was checking out, I noticed an amount of Rs. 726 charged to me for a call of 1.5 minutes, made to the US. Here’s the copy of the invoice as well as a screenshot from the PTCL website in case you’d like to see just how inflated the charge is.

Connectivity in Faisalabad
Since I was in Pakistan, I had to meet with relative up in Faisalabad. The PIA flight on Airbus A310 to Faisalabad was the longest, most uncomfortable business class travel I had ever experienced! On a less technical-more-ergonomic note, I can’t imagine which usability engineer designed these planes. They used to be a tight fit before –now they are just impossible to navigate into or out of!

As was expected, internet connectivity in a household that didn’t have heavy reliance on the online, wasn’t working. That’s because one common mistake many people make is that they add a wireless router to their existing DSL modem or router, keeping its default configuration. This creates a double NAT with duplicate networks. For instance, if there is an existing DSL modem/router assigning NAT and DHCP in the 192.168.1.x range on LAN side, if you connect another wireless router to it in its default configuration, you may create a double NAT with duplicate 192.168.1.x networks. This stops everything from working. A simple solution to change the range, so both the modem and the wireless router are assigning different IPs to their devices.

Connecting to Islamabad
My journey to Islamabad from there, was on the local counterpart of the Greyhound bus – the Daewoo. You make a simple booking over the phone and well, I had no problems in getting a seat when I reached the station 15 minutes prior to my departure. The interior of the bus is routine to what you would expect in a bus in Pakistan, but what surprised me was the sole LCD screen that had some sort of Linux Media Center interface with list of folders that probably contained movie files. Headphones were distributed made available to passengers who wanted to plug in and watch the movie, but I was already impressed.

During my journey, my iPhone with my UK O2 Sim began switching between different GSM providers as it lost and gained signal strength along the way. My iPhone once got connected to Ufone, dropped the signal and later joined another network. A few minutes later I received an SMS from Ufone trying to convince me that I should switch back to Ufone while I am in Pakistan since they have better rates. What was infuriating about this message was that Ufone not only stored my UK phone number into their marketing database without my knowledge, and had initiated a spampaign about their services without giving me the opportunity to opt-in for such SMS messages. I suppose the ethics of the situation will still take a while before they are ingrained into service providers.

But here’s the fun part of the trip, moreso for those of you have the iPhone and play around with applications.

I opened up the Speedometer app which uses GPS signals to determine your current speed and direction. The app took a few seconds to lock to the satellites and began displaying the live speed of the bus along with the direction of travel.

The journey was already livening up.

Now that I knew the speed and direction, I really wanted to launch Google maps to see my current location, but my past experience of using roaming data connection at the Dubai Airport a couple of months ago, and the shock of being billed £239.20 to download only a few email attachments, helped me to overcome the temptation rather quickly. O2, the exclusive provider of iPhone in the UK, charges £6 per MB to use a data connection while on roaming. Since Google maps are not stored locally unlike the other navigation systems, the iPhone has to fetch the local maps directly from the internet, which makes it impractical for roaming iPhone users to use Google maps.

In the presence of sanity and absence of Google maps, an app named ‘Airnav’ can come to the rescue in a situation like this. Airnav has a database of all ground stations that emit UHF/VHF radio signals for aircraft navigations. Additionally, the app also has GPS coordinates for each of the ground stations. Each ground station, called a “waypoint”, is named by its location. Since the iPhone GPS knows your current location, it can tell you the distance and direction to any of the waypoints in its database. You can either search all of your nearest ground stations, or select one from the list and the app will guide you towards that waypoint.

On searching the nearby waypoints, the app returned a list of 5 different locations within 96 nautical miles of my current location.

After selecting Islamabad from the list, another screen appeared which showed a compass and the distance to the waypoint in Islamabad. As the bus moved towards Islamabad, the areal distance in nautical miles towards Islamabad decreased, which some good clue about the remaining distance to the destination. The software had few more views that showed your traveling speed in knots.

There are a lot more features and overall, I found the app to be an excellent intercity road travel companion and navigator, especially for the places where Internet connection is not readily available. Browsing through the list of waypoints located in Pakistan, I found almost 40 different cities which the app picked up and displayed. A paid version of the same app offers many more features.

One of the things I absolutely love about GPS is the accuracy it has, along with the ability to communicate with any location on the planet which follows a tagging standard. Whether it’s the iPhone or some other device, even a route like the one I was traveling down, is not a disconnected entity.

Back to Life. Back to Virtual Reality
On my way back to London, I had a spare hour at the Islamabad airport and wanted to get online to run some maintenance tasks on one of the Linux servers I manage. The Islamabad airport has a few computers in the departure lounge with free Internet, but I always stay away from these shared computers as they are a security hazard. Always remember in your travels, most of these public computers are infested with key loggers that steal your account information when you login to your email or other accounts.

I had a local Zong (China Mobile) Sim in my Sony Ericsson W890i mobile, and I tried configuring Internet access from my MacBook Pro using the GPRS connection on my phone over Bluetooth. The phone paired with laptop without any issue but the laptop required some additional parameters for Internet connectivity over GPRS. One of these parameters is the APN (Access Point Name) and I had no idea about Zong’s APN, nor was I in the mood to discuss this with Zong’s customer services. I found that I had an old APN stored on my phone from a T-mobile connection that I used in the UK a long time ago and copied the same APN onto the dialup settings on my laptop. Surprisingly, the laptop got online with reasonable speed and I was able to complete my work in the next 30 minutes. The marvels of connectivity!

Once I got on the plane, I thought of trying to use the GPS location device in the plane. I had once used my “TomTom One” on a flight from Zurich to London which showed me complete maps of Europe and displaying roads and selected points of interests with reference to my current location – while I was in the air! Hence the infatuation with GPS at 30,000 feet!

I launched the Airnav app while passengers were still boarding the flight and the iPhone picked up the satellite signals quickly, however here was something I didn’t know: you lose the signals when you go into Flight mode which I thought was because the A-GPS might be using GSM signals to achieve a faster lock to the satellites. I later found out at the GPS functionality of the iPhone is disabled in Flight mode, which doesn’t make sense since, unlike GSM, Bluetooth or Wireless LAN which may interfere with the navigational system of the plane, GPS is just a receiver of signals which are already available inside plane. But this, this too, is a learning experience!

It is amazing how much reliance there is on technology to create everything from access points to tags. The advent of wireless connectivity coupled with GPS and other mobile push platforms enable these networks to be part of our integrated fabric. The trip to Pakistan was a really short one but enough to confirm that if an executive wishes to travel across the country, there is still rudiment amounts of connectivity and integration that will keep him plugged in.