Picking its battles: Witribe plays it smart, beats out the competition

Becomes the first company to offer internet monitoring to parents.

KARACHI:

One cannot always satisfy everyone, and especially not all the time. It is more efficient to target a segment that can be milked the most, or at least, that is the strategy being followed by Mustafa Peracha, the current CEO of Witribe. He knows he cannot satisfy all of the broadband customers in Pakistan, so unlike his competitors he is tactfully targeting a slightly more limited audience.

Often, one percent of the customers can tax up to 30-50% of the broadband network’s capacity. Being well aware of this, Peracha  does not plan on spoiling the experience of his core customers at the expense of some of the extreme users that often clog up the network. He also does not plan to cater to the hardcore mobility users.

Applying the 80-20 rule, he explains that his company is basically not trying to cater to the twenty percent of those users. Because these are the users that the company would have to go out of its way to accommodate both in terms of bandwidth, and mobility.

Ten per cent of that twenty are the hardcore gamers and the torrent downloaders. These people keep their broadband capacity utilised to the max at all times. They tax the network the most, but pay the same as the rest.

The other 10 per cent are the mobility users, who need to take their connections to remote/rural places in the country. And that would require a very extensive network. One that would not be quite as profitable given that they would be putting it up with a comparatively smaller amount of people. Again, this is a very small group of people who would not be paying a premium over others. Neither would the company be able to provide the quality of service that they want their customers to have.

Keeping this in mind, the management has strategised a segmented approach to customers, even the ‘unlimited’ packages his company provides has fair usage policies and are not exactly unlimited, but Witribe is doing this because it does not want to cater to the people who want unlimited downloads because they affect on the experience of the other users.

Under Peracha, the nascent broadband startup, Witribe has grown to become the second largest Qatartel property after their Indonesian broadband stake. “In the cities that Witribe does cover, we have had the highest growth rate of any broadband operator,” said Peracha proudly. Moreover, Peracha helps parent’s big brother their children. Under him, the company became the first to offer monitoring software as a service with one of the services being offered allowing parents to monitor and limit traffic via Netnanny.

Interestingly, he mentioned that, Youtube consumed the largest amount of bandwidth on the whole network, although he declined to give the precise percentage. “Facebook gets the highest number of hits in Pakistan but it still consumes less bandwidth than youtube,” he said.





Published in The Express Tribune, September 11^th, 2011.