With the arrival of Telenor, said the masses (I among them), Mobilink, Ufone, Paktel, all these market-hogs would get a boot in the rear. They would then proceed to surrender before the superiority of Telenor, wake up, pack up and leave. Albeit highly exaggerated, I did have a lot of high hopes from the whole "Telenor Pakistan Aa Raha Hai" Scenario. Why? Telenor is supposed to bring us 3G Mobile Technology, the wave of the future. With its launch as of March 15th, the newest GSM operator has severely disappointed me, for the time being at least.

Since yesterday, most people I meet seem to have but one topic worthy of discussion: have you bought a Telenor SIM yet? Rumors, most of them false, have taken over the public's imagination to cause an absolute uproar over Telenor. An acquaintance working at Telenor informed me that twenty-four hours after its launch, Telenor has ten thousand applications for SIMS and were now simply taking in filled applications and money and handing over preactivated SIMs to the eager public. However, when asked, nobody seems to be able to provide me with a single valid reason as to why I should abandon my current connection for Telenor?

To look at the billboards all over the Karachi skyline, one would wonder, what the heck is so special about Telenor anyway? Sure, it's a foreign brand, and hence, a big deal automatically. The billboards/advertisements invariably feature a fifty foot tall woman with her arms spread out, embracing the flowers falling from the heavens while various rural regulars such as an old farmer and his camel watch on in the background at this blessed, blessed person. A pretty good indicator of a company blowing smoke up your rear is when they show absolutely no substantial facts as to why you should opt for their product instead of their rivals'. I have searched far and wide for one advertisement that displayed Telenor's tariffs, rates, features, anything of substance. I finally got this information from their website and it wasn't too pretty. If you waltz in and announce your arrival without the slightest indication of what it is that should make us bow to you, you should at least have something worth bragging about. At the moment, Telenor is simply a GSM operator, one of the many, which would include the now GSM-Paktel as well as the giant Mobilink, and the once master of exclusivity, Ufone.

Since I'm short of time right now (on a break from Calculus class), I shall be very brief and just indicate a few areas of interest (for me at least). First of all, I must inform you, I'm a loyal Mobilink user, have been from the beginning, although their service as of late warrants no loyalty, but I'll admit I'd gladly change over if something of substance were being offered by someone else.

According to the prepaid tariff information provided by the company, Telenor offers pretty much the same 2.5G technology as Ufone currently does and Mobilink should by now: MMS and GPRS. Even the rates are absolutely unremarkable. Ufone and Telenor, as of now, both charge Rs. 15 per Mb of data for GPRS, and Rs. 5 per outgoing MMS. Coming back to the regular services, Telenor offers Rs. 1.50 per outgoing SMS, which is pretty much what everyone else offers, while incoming are free of charge, just like everyone else. Outgoing calls to other operators are Rs. 3.99 per minute with a prepaid Telenor connection while Mobilink announced this morning that they had reduced their outgoing call charges from Jazz connections to Rs. 3.50 per minute. Even including the fine print for mobilink's rates (connecting rates may cause a slight increase in the per minute cost of the first minute as the call connects), that still spells Mobilink-1, Telenor-0 to me.

So what's the big hullaballoo about, anyway? It will likely take around a year and a half for Telenor to set up the requisite infrastructure (maybe more time, maybe less, I'm certainly no technical expert), and till then, I'll stick with my own connection, thank you very much.