Oubay Atassi is renowned in Pakistan as one of the architects of Ufone’s network, having overseen phases one through three of their rollout during his tenure as Managing Director of Nortel Networks Pakistan from 2001-3. So ten years later, when Oubay wanted to extend the footprint of his Wi-Fi Broadband Service BurQ beyond Latin America, Pakistan was the natural choice. Although it’s early days in Pakistan for BurQ, and their holding company ICONDOR, their business plan calls for 2,500 tenancies on towers and over 300,000 access points in the next four years.
TowerXchange: Please introduce us to ICONDOR’s Wi-Fi Broadband Service BurQ and your recent launch in Pakistan.
Oubay Atassi, Chairman, ICONDOR Telecom:
ICONDOR provides a low cost, high speed Wi-Fi Broadband Service branded BurQ. Since the 1980s we have had a substantial footprint in Latin America; Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. We launched BurQ a couple of years ago in Pakistan and are already in eight cities, deploying aggressively.
We already offer our service in selected parts of KPK including Bannu, Kohat, Peshawar, Mardan, Nowshera, D.I.Khan and Rawalpindi. We’re bringing low cost Broadband to relatively low income areas of Pakistan, but plan to extend the service into the major cities like Islamabad (where we already provide a limited service) and Hyderabad.
TowerXchange: How big is your network today and what is your vision for the future?
Oubay Atassi, Chairman, ICONDOR Telecom:
BurQ is small today; we have co-locations on ten sites in eight cities. However we project expanding to 300,000 access points from co-locations on 2,500 towers over the next four years.
TowerXchange: What has been the proportion of built versus rented existing sites in your network? And what has been your experience of leasing towers in Pakistan?
Oubay Atassi, Chairman, ICONDOR Telecom:
We’re renting towers rather than building our own.
For us, securing co-location is relatively easy as the MNOs don’t see us as competition, and most have been open to sharing their towers and bandwidth, but in general I understand there has been very little bi-lateral tower sharing between Pakistan’s MNOs – so far we’ve almost always been the first additional tenant on each tower we have leased. The towers on which we’ve co-located have generally had space capacity and have been in good shape.
TowerXchange: What do you feel will be the impact of independent tower companies entering Pakistan? For example, Towershare acquiring 4,500 towers from Warid.
Oubay Atassi, Chairman, ICONDOR Telecom:
Negotiating infrastructure sharing agreements with an MNO can be a lengthy process. For example, with one of Pakistan’s major MNOs it was a four month negotiation based around a 42 page document – we must have gone back and forth 20 times!
Towercos won’t want to lose four months of revenue negotiating, so we anticipate a substantial acceleration in time to market.
Negotiating infrastructure sharing agreements with an MNO can be a lengthy process. For example, with one of Pakistan’s major MNOs it was a four month negotiation based around a 42 page document – we must have gone back and forth 20 times! Towercos won’t want to lose four months of revenue negotiating, so we anticipate a substantial acceleration in time to market
TowerXchange: Is infrastructure sharing sufficiently widespread in Pakistan to establish a fair market rate for leases?
Oubay Atassi, Chairman, ICONDOR Telecom:
Probably not! For us, costs are in the range of US$800-1000pcm per tower per month.
TowerXchange: What is the biggest obstacle to be overcome in order to enable your business to grow and thrive in Pakistan?
Oubay Atassi, Chairman, ICONDOR Telecom:
We’re lobbying the regulator to have the 100m law removed. Under my business model, I can add hundreds of access points over a 15-20km radius from a single tower site. While it’s not a problem for signal propagation, the 100m restriction gives us a hard time to deploy backhaul over any distance more than 100m. I think the regulator understands our case and the restriction will be removed.
TowerXchange: What do you think are the prospects of a new entrant coming into the market through the 3G license process?
Oubay Atassi, Chairman, ICONDOR Telecom:
The government may be expecting foreign investors to bid, but they won’t invest unless tower accessibility is improved. The last licenses were acquired only by local companies as they were the only parties able to transition from 2G to 3G and eventually 4G and compete with the incumbent operators, each of which has over 5,000 towers.
To date, there hasn’t been any push toward sharing, but the PTA have to create rules around infrastructure sharing to attract international tower companies to invest in Pakistan.
TowerXchange: Finally, what has been your experience of the quality and availability of grid power in Pakistan?
Oubay Atassi, Chairman, ICONDOR Telecom:
Four hours of autonomy is generally sufficient to ride out most outages, except perhaps at certain times in Summer. On our towers, we have generally used the anchor tenant’s backup power systems - most sites have battery banks and backup DGs. And all our access points have their own UPS.
