Official Connect2Pk Blog

That’s right – we’ve put up a new theme on our blog. And that’s not all; we have also categorized all blog posts into 5 different categories. We hope our users will find the new theme more user-friendly.

Have a nice day!

The Connect2Pk team wishes a very Happy Independence Day to the whole nation! We are really proud to celebrate the 62nd birthday of Pakistan with our users.

Pakistan Zindabad!

The free calling does not stop here! Connect2Pk has automatically updated all mapped numbers of Karachi & Lahore users. Due to PTCL 8 digit migration, many users were facing problems using our system. We’ve added ’3′ in the start of your mapped numbers so that you don’t have to create another account to avail our service.

For more details, please log-in at http://www.connect2pk.com/ and view your profile. In case your number has not been updated, feel free contact us at support@connect2pk.com

Happy talking!

Yes, we’ve finally found PTCL migration stable enough to take necessary steps. Our team is now working on your accounts to make them compatible with our system so that all calls can get through easily. Your numbers will be updated having 3 in the beginning. All Karachi & Lahore users should check their profiles and let us know if their numbers haven’t been updated by the weekend.

Once the process is complete, we’ll email all ‘Active’ users about their number alteration so that they can start using Connect2Pk service once again.

Have a nice day!

We would like to notify all Connect2Pk users that some of you will be facing problems connecting to your friends & family abroad. Calls might not go through specially from the mapped numbers of Karachi and Lahore (due to 7 to 8 digit migration). However, if you have an alternate account registered on your cell-phone number, we would suggest you to dial using your cell-phone number until the PTCL migration get stable.

New user registration has been temporarily disabled and we hope to enable them as soon as we find PTCL migration system complete enough to support our system.

We apologize for any inconvenience. You patience in this case will be highly appreciated. For further queries, feel free to post a query on our forums!

We’ve been working on this feature recently and our team is glad to announce that all Nokia phones having built-in SIP feature are now supported on our server. Users can now receive calls directly on their handsets without installing any third party applications. To setup your phone now, simply follow the instructions listed on our website under ‘How to set up on Mobile?’ or visit: http://www.connect2pk.com/nokia-settings.html

Also, Connect2Pk can now be configured with Nimbuzz – yet another symbian VoIP application like Fring. Users who might be interested in using application can set up with the help of: http://www.connect2pk.com/nimbuzz-settings.html

For any queries, feel free to drop us a note on our Forums and we’ll be more than glad to help you out setting up Connect2Pk on your phones.

Happy talking!

Connect2Pk.com offers free calls from Pakistan. It’s a “Phone to PC” & “PC to PC” call solution. Connect2Pk offers local Pakistan phone numbers dialing (Karachi, Islamabad etc) through which the caller is connected to the softphone on PC, anywhere in the world! To register an account, simply provide a number within Pakistan (from which you will receive phone calls) and ask your friends & family to dial the Pakistan local phone number (Connect2pk number) from the registered number and the call will be forwarded to your PC/mobile.

To put this in simple steps:

• Assuming that you are living anywhere outside Pakistan and you want to talk to your friends & family living in Pakistan
• Assuming that your friends & family have either a landline phone or a mobile phone. And you have a PC with internet connection

Steps for free calls to Pakistan:

1. Register with Connect2Pk.com

Enter your name, email address and password.
Now in the Mapped number field (enter your friends & family Pakistan number).

2. Download the PC application (X-lite). You can also configure Fring to receive calls directly on your mobile phone. You will get SIP settings in your email.

SIP settings:
Username: <Your username>
Password: <Your password>
Domain: connect2pk.com:5065

3. Now ask your friends & family to call local Pakistan Connect2pk numbers. Any one of the local access numbers which is cheap for your friends & family in Pakistan:

• 021-7016586 (Karachi)
• 041-5529224 (Faisalabad)
• 042-2008625 (Lahore)
• 051-7185152 (Islamabad)

4. You will receive the phone call directly on your softphone (it could be either PC or mobile)

Call limits will be applied to all users as defined on the website:

• 20min/call, round the clock!
• 4-10am (PST), 45min/call

So this way you can connect to your loved ones in Pakistan for free. The only cost your friends & family will bear would be charges of a local call as per the tariff of PTCL or any other cellular network.

For more info, you may refer to the FAQ section.

“The person is unavailable, please leave your message..” – some of you must have already heard this recording. Yes, Connect2Pk has enabled VoiceMail for all users. If you’re unable to attend your call, your efforts do not go in vain but your calling party can always leave a little voice message for you. All VoiceMails are sent directly to the registered email address and are deleted from our server.

Your calling party will be forwarded to our VoiceMail system when:

• the call is not picked up for 25 seconds
• the softphone is busy or not turned ON

We send VoiceMail as an attachment on your email address. Users can easily listen to the message using any basic media player that supports .WAV format. For further assistance, feel free to post your queries on our Forums.

Happy messaging!

Yes, we’ve shifted to a new and powerful servers this weekend. Voice quality has been enhanced even further and Connect2Pk is now providing VoiceMail feature to all users.

We hope you’ll experience better quality on your calls from now onwards. New user registration has been enabled and we’ll be posting details about VoiceMail in our next post, stay tuned.

Happy Pakistan Day to everyone!

March 3 marks an important day in the history of Connect2Pk. The idea clicked us in January 2008 and at that time we majorly thought of it as a paid service. After surveying the market, seeing competitive rates, we decided to launch it as a free service and then move towards a paid service. Our plan didn’t work out the way we assumed and we didn’t even get many users in the initial days. Anyway, we bundled up some courage – worked day and night on the weekends, tested various features and started finalizing our website for the beta release. It was March 3, 2008 when the beta version 1.0 of the website was available for public by the Grace of Almighty Allah.

From day 1, we made our mind-set to help out our users as much as we can so as to enable them using our service in a better way. Many people thought we were ‘just another fake service’ and only dropped emails with negative feedback. Initial week went tough, we spent most of the time marketing and the durations of the call placed through our system was just few minutes! Our team was also providing live support to users through instant messengers so that we could have more users to try out our service. During second week, we reached 100 users – out of which most of them were friends of friends or acquaintances. We stopped providing support on instant messenger and asked all users to email us in case of any queries. But on the other hand, our support was rapid on the emails. Disappointed by the response to our service, we started putting up advertisements on our website so as to generate some revenue for keeping the setup live.

3rd week started, we saw ourselves in total loss, and finally a good marketing tactic struck us, email marketing! And Alhamdulillah, it actually proved to be the dawn of our service. With the increase in traffic on our website, our ad-funded model started proving itself and we recovered all our investment. It gave as a very gratifying feeling to assist all our users from different part of world – help them out and see their happy emails for connecting them to their friends & family.

Months passed by, and we gradually started conquering more cities. Connect2Pk started off with only 1 city i.e. Karachi. But with the increase in traffic, we utilized our revenue and re-invested in our service. Added cities to our service whenever it was required and by the grace of Allah, Connect2Pk now supports over 30+ simultaneous calls with the help of 4 cities, majorly due to the new Islamabad number. We’ve tweaked our website 2 times during the past year and have tried to improve it as per our user experience & feedback. From email support, we have now implemented community forums so that user can get instant solution to their queries. Frequent updates to our system are provided on our blog as well as Twitter.

3rd week of March was the last time when we felt unenthusiastic about our service. Our hopes and target were boosted by our users and MashAllah today we have a user base of more than 17,000 and counting! Daily statistics have shot up to 13,000 minutes of talk-time/day with 800+ unique visitors on the website along with 3,500+ page views. Also, Connect2Pk users are spread across 125+ countries and we’ve got really lovely feedback from our users (take a look here).

Few of our users are waiting for the paid service, and they’ll get some good news in the upcoming days InshAllah. We have some serious maintenance pending in the next few weeks, and we hope to enable some new features after that.

How did we perform last year? We would love to hear your feedback on it! Feel free to drop us an email or comment to this post so that we can improve our service as much as we can.

Thanks to our dear friends & all users who helped us made it. Happy talking!