PTCL is Likely to Discontinue the Student DSL Package

A note published on October Monthly bills of PTCL.

This probably won’t be very pleasing for all the students out there, but the news is that PTCL is likely to phase out its extremely popular student package over a period of next few months.

While we don’t have official confirmation for this, however, sources confirm us that company is looking for ways to substitute its student package with other similar products.

It merits mentioning here that PTCL has communicated its customers through monthly bills this month that 1 MB student package would be charged at Rs. 1,250, while 2 MB student package will be charged Rs. 1,450 from November 1st, 2013.

Not to mention, these charges are usual tariff for normal broadband packages.

Student segment, as mentioned above, is immensely lucrative and shares hefty amount of broadband subscribers for PTCL, the market leader in broadband market.

With changing market dynamics, company is now looking for ways to capitalize the niche with similar but capped products to boost revenues. One such example is Economy Broadband Package, that offers 1Mbps speeds at a monthly charge of Rs. 499, but comes with 10 GB data limit per month.

PTCL told that customers should expect a wide array of products for students starting 2014. Company said that not only various new broadband packages will be announced but more technologies will be brought into the scope to entertain the students.

However, for time being at least, the discount granted to students for broadband DSL is over.

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PTCL Launches Cloud Services in Pakistan

PTCL has become the third major player in the country to offer cloud services to SMEs and large sized enterprises.

While there is no major or official mention of the cloud solutions from PTCL’s side, company’s dedicated website for cloud services is already up and live.

In collaboration with Viper technologies, PTCL is currently offering dedicated servers, disaster recovery services, file hosting and messaging and collaboration services on its cloud.

PTCL says that it can offer cloud computing solutions from its data centre facilities located in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi.

It maybe recalled that PTCL recently announced its agreement with Allama Iqbal Open University for provision of its cloud services. Moreover, it is said that government of Pakistan has locked a deal with PTCL to get its e-governance project running on PTCL’s cloud services.

Given the fact that PTCL has already got two (highly paying) clients, we are not sure about the quality of services that PTCL will offer to small and medium sized businesses. However, their plans for dedicated public/private servers are quite interesting.

Have a look at server plans below:

P.S. Prices mentioned here do no include network bandwidth, for which you will be charged extra based on your bandwidth needs.

Plans for file cloud hosting and disaster recovery services are competitive too – with respect to local market.

Businesses operating in the country can get a good proposition for hosting their websites with-in the country, which will not only bring them better ping rates but also an increased trust factor. However, online portals like us – with major Pakistani audience – will have to see the quality of service, support, security and uptime before actually singing-up with local cloud solutions.

Visit PTCL’s cloud website here: http://ptclcloud.com.pk, which seems inspired byRapidCompute, Cybernet’s cloud services, especially the cloud calculator. Go and check yourself.

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