PTA's draft IoT rules price a licence at Rs105,000 and give operators a year to start
The proposed LPWAN regulations set a low entry fee and a deadline aimed at licensees that never built a network. The spectrum on offer is narrow, shared and unprotected.
A licence to run a network for sensors in Pakistan would cost Rs105,000 under draft rules from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, and it would be cancelled if the holder did not start service within a year. The draft IoT and Low Power Wide Area Networks Licensing Regulations 2026, reported on 6 November, charge Rs100,000 for a five year licence to carry IoT traffic for third parties, plus a Rs5,000 processing fee.
The fee is the headline. The deadline is the substance. PTA opened applications for IoT licences in May 2022, and by a consultation on its revised framework in 2025 it had issued 23 LPWAN licences. Only five licensees were operating then, and three more had put up gateways for tests and trials. That count is a year old, but it explains why the draft is built around obligations to start rather than a high price to enter.
Four tiers, four fees
The draft sorts IoT activity into three legal states: exempt, registered and licensed. A commercial operator, meaning anyone selling LPWAN connectivity to third parties including consumers, needs the licence. The first bill is Rs105,000. Operators of a private network on their own premises, such as a farm, factory or campus, register for Rs10,000 plus Rs5,000, again for five years. Providers of IoT platforms and applications that never touch the radio hardware register on the same terms. Research and trials sit in a one year sandbox registration at Rs2,000 plus Rs1,000.
Cellular operators do not need the new licence to offer IoT on the spectrum they already hold. Device importers are outside it, though they must still meet type approval rules, as are devices in the shared short range bands.
The money is trivial for PTA. If all 23 existing licensees paid the new fee, the take would be about Rs2.4 million (23 times Rs105,000). The fee is not meant to raise revenue. It is a filter, and the real filter is the obligations attached to it.
What the licence now demands
A licensed operator must obtain a commencement certificate from PTA within one year of the regulations taking effect. PTA may grant one extension of up to six months on a justified request, so the longest a licence can sit idle is 18 months. Existing LPWAN licensees get 90 days to register their gateways after the rules come into force. Every gateway is registered through PTA's online system, and operators file quarterly reports on active IoT connections and gateway counts, with commercial licensees adding a breakdown by district.
Backend traffic, including satellite backhaul, must run through a PTA licensed Local Access Provider, and using an unlicensed one leads to automatic cancellation. That continues the January 2026 revision of the framework, which also barred storing IoT data outside Pakistan without PTA approval. PTA can suspend or restrict services at any time on national security or public safety grounds.
Taken together, these conditions turn a licence from an option into a commitment. A company could once hold the paper and wait for demand. Now it has to deploy gateways, report connections each quarter and keep its data path inside licensed Pakistani carriers.
The spectrum is narrow and shared
The draft proposes LPWAN operation at 433.05 to 434.79 MHz and 920 to 925 MHz, at no more than 1 watt, on a secondary basis with no interference protection. The Frequency Allocation Board may consider exclusive assignments case by case. The two bands add up to 6.74 MHz (1.74 plus 5.00). Technologies such as LoRa commonly use channels 125 kHz wide, which gives room for roughly 13 channels in the lower band and 40 in the upper, before guard bands. The draft does not name a technology, so these counts are the magazine's arithmetic, not PTA's.
The consequence follows from the physics. Many operators sharing a few dozen narrow channels with unlicensed devices will see interference rise as networks fill. A secondary licence in these bands buys the right to operate, not the right to be heard, and a utility that needs guaranteed delivery would have to ask for an exclusive assignment.
Who gains and who loses
Small operators and platform builders gain most. A Rs10,000 registration lets a firm that builds irrigation, metering or fleet software on IoT data operate legally without owning radios, and the Rs2,000 sandbox lowers the cost of a trial. Factories and farms that run private networks pay a modest fee and avoid commercial licensing altogether.
Idle licence holders lose, because those without gateways inside the deadline will see licences cancelled. Licensees that carry data abroad also lose, because the Local Access Provider rule and the data localisation condition force a reroute. Mobile operators keep their advantage, since they can sell IoT over spectrum and networks that already exist without a separate licence.
The comment deadline, the date the rules take effect and any spectrum charges on top of the licence fee are not yet known. They matter because every clock in the draft, the one year to start service and the 90 days to register gateways, runs from the day the final rules take effect. The comment deadline is the first date to watch.
