Wateen Telecom

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Wateen Telecom

Type	Private
Founded	2007
Founder	Abu Dhabi Group
Headquarters	Lahore, Pakistan
Industry	Telecommunication
Products	Wimax,HFC Network
Parent	Abu Dhabi Group
Website	www.wateen.com

Wateen Telecom is a Pakistani telecommunication company based in Lahore, Pakistan and is a sister concern of Warid Telecom.

Wateen Telecom is the Abu Dhabi Group's latest communication investment in Pakistan. Wateen Telecom's current goals are to be set up as the leading "Carrier's Carrier". With the collaboration of Motorola, they plan on deploying a WiMax country-wide network across Pakistan. This network will become one of the largest of its kind in the world. Wateen also envisions the provisioning of Direct-to-Home television services for Pakistani viewers1

The commercial launch of WiMAX services in 22 major cities took place on 16th of December 2007.

Wateen Telecom launched with many expectations from both the provider itself and many customers. However, having capped packages, poor customer service, uncooperative franchise employees and poor quality of service (QoS) have negatively impacted Wateen's reputation with its customers.Initially at launch Wateen was using a proxy/cache server which directed all requests that were made by wateen's customers on port 80 AKA HTTP to a single IP which made it look like a DOS by many sites including wikipedia and google. Initial customers, who paid upfront for the CPE had a lot of problems given that the CPE s were underpowered and locked up during bit torrent downloads. Wateen has recently introduced new cheaper packages with no compensation to its older customers earning it severe criticism for what its older customers term "unconcerned treatment of 'paying' beta testers".

Wateen's deployment of Wimax suffers from many technical issues, one of which is its usage of 4 to 5 layers of NAT in its network architecture.The technical competency of Wateen is also under question due to under-qualified staff who have been repeatedly found to lack technical knowledge of basic networking terms and configurations.

However , being the first launch of a nationwide wimax network in pakistan , it is facing problems of all kind , both on technical and managerial fronts. Their signal strength is not stable in most regions and their support and billing is also not upto the mark at the moment. But it is hoped that they will improve over time.