Nationwide 5G will take two more years, government tells National Assembly
The IT ministry says 5G is live in 24 cities on 1,782 sites, and that wider coverage will wait until service in those cities is stable.
Pakistan will need another two years to bring 5G to the whole country, Parliamentary Secretary for IT Sabeen Ghouri told the National Assembly on Friday 23 October. She said the service is now available in 24 cities and that the ministry wants it to stabilise there before it spreads to more areas.
Lawmakers used the answer to complain about the networks they already pay for. Aseefa Bhutto Zardari of the Pakistan Peoples Party said neither 4G nor 5G was working properly in Nawabshah and other places, and asked for a coordinated plan to lift speeds. Her party colleague Nabeel Gabol said 5G had raised expectations but users were getting slower connections. Noor Alam said consumers are being charged for 5G they cannot reliably use. Abdul Qadir Patel, who was presiding, asked whether 4G had died if 5G was being introduced, and said internet service had worsened in recent years. Ghouri added that 2G and 3G services were disrupted in some areas by unrest and security problems.
The ministry's figures
The Ministry of IT's written reply put Pakistan's mobile users at 210 million, of whom 161.7 million use mobile broadband. It said 1,782 5G sites have been established since the service launched on 20 March, and that expansion to more cities will come in phases, with stability and service quality on the existing network taking priority. In Karachi the count rose from 50 to 385 between July and September, an addition of 295 sites in three months. The city now holds about 21.5 percent of the national total. The ministry expects the city to pass 1,000.
On handsets, the reply said more than 600,000 5G capable phones were assembled locally between January and August, and that the cheapest 5G handset costs Rs36,000. Customers do not need a new SIM to use 5G, only a compatible phone and coverage.
The ministry also acknowledged that long load shedding, electricity theft and vandalism are hurting service quality. A high level committee is examining dedicated power feeders, smart grids and industrial feeders, and towers have been told to keep batteries, solar panels and generators as backup. To bring handset prices down, the ministry said it is considering lower mobile taxes, incentives for local smartphone manufacturing and duty free imports of 5G equipment.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority is running field surveys on service quality. It gave mobile operators until October to close coverage gaps in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, so the first test of the ministry's stabilise first approach falls in the twin cities this month.
