KARACHI, June 30: Telephone services would be available to the entire population of the country in the next four years. This was stated by Federal Minister for Information Technology and Telecom Awais Ahmed Khan Leghari here on Friday.

He was talking to reporters after the concluding ceremony of the Pakistan Developer Conference 2006.

The minister was of the view that the quality of IT education in the country was low.

He said that in order to change the situation, the IT ministry was converting IT disciplines of 25 varsities into what he termed 'A class'.

Earlier speaking at the conference, the federal minister pointed out that some three years back our varsities’ students showed hardly any interest in the telecommunication engineering discipline.

The minister said that things had changed with the increase in demand and a number of students were now pursuing their careers in the telecommunication industry.—APP