Where are the updates? Anyways, We're now in the middle of Feb and there is a lot of interesting news speculation about the PTCL privitization. WorldCall is waiting eagerly on the wings to provide telephony services to over their HFC network, and I'm sure there must be others out there also. Voice over IP makes it possible for a new player to bypass PTCL completely and provide cheap calls to the US. There's a whole lot of interesting information about Pakistan's telecom sector at Tee Emm's Window to Pakistan.

On the irony front: FLAG Telecom has been bought out by the Reliant Group, which is an Indian company. In the 90's Pakistan passed on the change not once, not twice, but thrice! to establish a fiberoptic link with the rest of the world as that link was also going to terminate in India. Of course, then as now, government officials wondered why the hell we need so much bandwidth here anyways... still I recall one offical trotting out the India issue as one of the major reasons of not signing on when the cable was being laid.
Flag Telecom supplies a major portion of Pakistan's bandwidth.

To the people at Spider: You already have a web presence, how about installing something like Movabletype over there and making a proper blog? You could post stuff on to the blog which is rejected for the magazine, and other shorter ramblings which are to short for the magazine. It would be interesting. Also, I doubt that you are making any money from your archives currently, so why not put them up on the web? Wired Magazine does it, and makes money off it also! No one is going to pay for old Spider Issues - at least not enough to make it profitable.