USF Pakistan progresses in rural areas under PM Raja Parvez Ashraf

In an ceremony in Sanghar on Saturday 24th February, the Prime Minister, Raja Parvez Ashraf inaugurated a number of telecommunications and health and education projects of worth Rs. 1.7 billion. During his speech on the occassion he said that the social and economic development of the country was linked to the growth in telecom sector and that the government was putting its best efforts  to bring all parts of the country at the same level.

The efforts of Universal Service Fund (USF) are the depiction of the efforts of the government where USF was able to provide basic telephony and data services to 213 villages in Mirpurkhas and 426 villages in Dadu with subsidies of  Rs. 930 million and Rs 250 million respectively under their Rural Telecom Project.Under their Optic Fibre programme, 1038 kilometre optic fibre cable has been laid via a subsidy of Rs. 449 million due to which 17 unserved tehsils of Sindh have been connected. Moreover, 77 cities and towns in Southern Telecom Region-I were connected under the Broad-band programme with the help of a subsidy of Rs. 549 million.

The Prime Minister inaugurated local development projects including rehabilitation of a Basic Health Unit (BHU), a primary school, up-gradation of a middle school of girls to high school, repair of bridge at Chak 11, installation of street lights and electric poles and a water filtration plant.
Prime Minister Raja Parvez Ashraf also inaugurated ten classrooms of Commerce Block at Government Degree College Sanghar and an additional 10 rooms at the Government High School Sanghar, which were constructed for Rs 15.046 million and Rs 9.988 million respectively.

China is Now the World’s Largest Market for Smart Devices

China has now overtaken the United States of America in being the biggest market for smart devices like Android and iOS phones and tablets. The market for smart devices in China started growing a year ago and within one year has taken to the first position. Even though, this is the first time that China has overtaken the American market, but it is just with a slight numbers. However, if the Chinese market growth rate remains consistent as it is now, it will take lead with higher numbers.

The report is based on the study by Flurry, which tracked 2.4 billion anonymous application sessions per day from different parts of the world. Having done so, the company claims that they were able to accurately measure activity of 90 percent of the world’s smart devices. Just about a month ago, both China and the U.S. were head-to-head in the market share, but this month in February, China took the lead for the first time.

In January, the U.S. had 222 million active smart devices and China had 221 million, now China is predicted to have 246 million devices and the U.S. increase will take it to 230 million. The third country with the highest number of smart devices is the United Kingdom with 43 million and South Korea is fourth with 40 million active smart devices. The experts who have a keen eye on the trends of the growing smart devices market say that the U.S. will not be able to take back its top spot.

Based merely on the population, the U.S. cannot exceed more than 310 million smart device users. The only country that is predicted to overtake China is India with a population of 1.2 billion people. But that will take some years before we can see India on the top spot as currently there are only 19 million active smart devices in India.