Pakistan Telecom

Pakistan is the world’s eighth largest mobile phone user market and a significant amount of foreign exchange is spent on the import of mobile phones to meet annual demand. The country code for Pakistan is 92

The fixed line market in Pakistan remains underdeveloped due to the dominance of the mobile segment. Further, the number of fixed telephone lines is slowly declining as the mobile segment continues to expand.

The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have also both been active in providing capital for country’s telecom sector. This contributed to a number of telecommunications projects, most of which have been involved in the laying of fibre optic cable and the installation of digital electronic switches. Pakistan has also had a universal access policy, which, among other things, was been aimed at expanding rural coverage by providing a phone in every village. Almost 70% of the country’s population live in rural areas. But, as with most developing countries, growth of telephone services has been concentrated in the big cities. Up to 90% of fixed lines had been installed in urban areas. Of these, over 50% were in the three largest cities.

The mobile telecommunications sector is seeing very large year-to-year growth in Pakistan. Approximately 90 percent of Pakistanis live within areas that have cell phone coverage and more than half of all Pakistanis have access to a cell phone. With 180 million mobile subscribers in January 2021, Pakistan has the highest mobile penetration rate in the South Asian region.

Today we have 176 million mobile and smart phones connections with more than 83% tele-density and 2.2 million fixed-line subscribers. The country currently has international bandwidth connectivity of 3.1 Tera Bytes and around 47,000 cell sites, of which 90% are 4G enabled sites. The data usage stands at 4,498 Peta Bytes (FY2020), compared to 2,545 Peta Bytes in FY 2019 that shows a growth of over 77%.

According to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, Jazz leads the market with 59 million subscribers, followed by Telenor with 29.3 million, Ufone with 23.1 million and Zong with 15.6 million.