Given my recent project on call centers, I was keen on learning more about the offerings of different bandwidth and data providers in Pakistan, especially in Lahore.
The experience is turning out to be both refreshing and saddening.
First the sad bit.
Wateen, the ‘data provider’ sister concern of Warid Telecom was the first to hold my attention. Long story short, they are the only one, it seems, that provide hosted dialer services for call centers in Pakistan. They suggested to get a solution that costed a sizeable 1.8 Million rupees or so. After gagging for a while and almost dropping my cup of tea, the provider was changed from Wateen to Cyber Net, with a total cost reduced from 1.8 Million, to oh say, 80 thousand rupees. Well, what about the remaining 1.72 Million rupees that Wateen suggested we spend on just getting hosted dialer services up and running? Well, the major cost was laying fibre optic cable for an odd 3 kms or so. Undergound laying of cable is surely a major cost. Wateen and their over-enthusiastic sales personal were not keen on letting my client/friend know that there are other options. That is the sad bit.
The refreshing part is in the above paragraph of course, that had I not been on the project, an expenditure of 1.7 million rupees would have made, purely because the decision maker does not know IT at all, and he is in a hurry. Who says that consultants are paid too much, just look at the cost savings. It suddenly doesn’t seem like rocket science, now does it?
