A couple of days ago there was an announcement in the newspaper about how the government will now allow ISPs to offer DSL in Pakistan. Until now, only 4 companies could do this and they still have a tight grip on everything, so prices should start to fall soon. Hurray. Reminds me of what was happening in Japan about 3 years ago.
One big difference that I’ve seen is that while we had unlimited data transfer with a typical connection in Japan, the ones here always charge by the Mega/Giga/Tera byte. Our office connection finally came through last night and we now have 128Kbps DSL with a fixed IP, but we’ll be charged extra (at a higher rate) for data exceeding 2GB. That’s barely enough for downloading a typical linux distro.
On the bright side, another phone line has been freed from the shackles of dialup and we have more than twice the speed. For bigger downloads I’ll just have to bug the good guys at the data center.