Every broadband operator cleared PTA's 4 Mbps floor, yet customers at PTCL and Nayatel still missed their plan speeds
The regulator's third quarter survey found no operator below its minimum speed, while seven operators fell short of 80 percent of the speed customers were sold. The gap says more about the benchmark than about the networks.
Every fixed broadband operator the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority tested in the third quarter delivered at least 4 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up. Yet only 16 of 28 operator and city entries met all seven of the authority's network indicators, and customers at PTCL, Nayatel and five other operators received less than 80 percent of the speed they were sold. The authority published its Quality of Service survey for July to September on 11 November.
The survey has two halves. The network end test was run by the authority's Enforcement Division, which inspected network operation centres at 23 unique operators in 21 cities and scored each of 28 entries against seven indicators under the Fixed Broadband Quality of Service Regulations, 2022. The user end test measured what customers receive at 12 operators in 15 cities, against eight indicators.
The network end result
Sixteen entries met all seven indicators, which is 57 percent of 28. The rest scored 85.71 percent or 57.14 percent, which are six of seven and four of seven indicators. The indicators are core network availability of at least 99.9 percent, access network availability of at least 99 percent, bandwidth utilisation at or below 80 percent, local latency of 40 milliseconds, international terrestrial latency of 110 milliseconds, jitter of 15 milliseconds and minimum throughput of 4 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up. All operators met the latency limits and the speed minimums, so the failures sit in availability, utilisation and jitter.
The lowest score, 57.14 percent, went to Pace Telecom and Broadcasting in Abbottabad. Its core network availability was 99.73 percent against 99.9 percent required, and access network availability was 97.13 percent against 99 percent. Falcon Broadband in Vehari recorded jitter of 40.61 milliseconds against a ceiling of 15. Bandwidth utilisation also exceeded the 80 percent limit on some networks, which the authority said can slow speeds at peak hours.
What the availability gap means in hours
Availability percentages look small, so they are converted here. July to September is 92 days, or 132,480 minutes. If the figures cover the whole quarter, a core network meeting 99.9 percent can be down for about 132 minutes. Pace's 99.73 percent implies roughly 358 minutes, close to six hours and nearly triple the allowance. On the access side, a 99 percent requirement allows about 1,325 minutes, or 22 hours. A reading of 97.13 percent implies about 3,800 minutes, or 63 hours, close to three times the allowance. The authority has not said how long its measurement window was, so these are readings of the published percentages, not logged outages.
Falcon's jitter was 2.7 times the limit, from 40.61 divided by 15. Jitter is the variation in delay between packets. It is what breaks a video call or an online game even when average speed looks fine.
The customer's side
At the user end the pass mark is set against the plan the customer pays for, not a fixed floor. Download must exceed 80 percent of the advertised speed. Upload must exceed 25 percent of it for xDSL and 50 percent for other technologies. Jitter must stay under 15 milliseconds, packet loss under 1 percent and a webpage must load in four seconds. By that yardstick results were weaker. Multinet Pakistan in Rawalpindi met 2 of 8 indicators, 25 percent. Cyber Internet Services scored 37.5 percent in Lahore and 50 percent in Islamabad. Only Wide Band Communications in Peshawar met all eight.
Seven operators were flagged for download throughput: Multinet, Cyber Internet, Connect Communications, Nexlinx Networks, PTCL, Nayatel and Burak Tech. PTCL and Multinet also appear on the lists for local latency and jitter, and PTCL is named for packet loss as well.
The mechanism is plain. A 4 Mbps floor ignores the plan. Take a line sold as 50 Mbps that delivers 10 Mbps: it clears the floor easily, but the user end benchmark of 80 percent would require 40 Mbps. The two tests answer different questions, and the speed floor alone cannot say whether a customer got what was sold.
A different survey from last quarter
The authority's report on the previous quarter assessed 34 operators across 24 cities against five indicators, and 27 of its 40 entries scored full compliance. The operators, cities and indicators all differ from the third quarter test, so the shares of 68 percent and 57 percent do not show a trend.
Failing carries a direction, not a fine. The authority told non compliant operators to take corrective measures, including more capacity, better network optimisation, congestion management, improved routing, higher availability and lower jitter, and said it will run follow up tests to verify the fixes. It announced no penalty and no deadline.
Buyers should treat the compliance score as a check on network health, not a ranking of what a customer will experience. An operator can pass every network indicator and still miss its plan speeds at the user end, as the PTCL and Nayatel results show. The next concrete step is the follow up round of tests, for which the authority has not published a date.
