PTA's twin cities deadline passes while its site inspections keep turning up power faults
The regulator's October deadline for mobile operators in Islamabad and Rawalpindi ended on 31 October. Its weekly inspection rounds, now past 900 sites, point to batteries, generators and cables more than to missing towers.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority's deadline for mobile operators to close coverage gaps in Islamabad and Rawalpindi expired on 31 October, and the regulator has not yet published what its own tests found. What it has published is a run of weekly inspection rounds across the country, and the faults they list say something about why signals fail.
In September the PTA told operators to remove coverage gaps in both cities by October, naming Kashmir Highway and the Islamabad Expressway, and to install new sites where needed. Operators that failed to show measurable improvement could face financial penalties, though no amounts were given. On the deadline day, Brigadier (retd) Amir Shahzad, the PTA's Director General Enforcement, ran drive tests along routes including Blue Area, Kashmir Highway, Margalla Road, Peshawar Road and the road to Islamabad International Airport, and phoned operator officials as he went. The chairman will now review services in the twin cities personally, and operators will receive coverage gap reports.
Three rounds, 465 sites
The PTA's zonal offices have been inspecting sites in weekly rounds. From 30 September to 7 October they checked 115 sites, 14 of them in Rawalpindi. From 15 to 22 October the count was 166, and from 22 to 28 October it was 184, in 13 areas that included Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The last round brought the PTA's stated cumulative total to more than 900.
Our arithmetic: the three rounds add up to 465 sites, a little over half of that total. The weekly count rose 44 percent from the first round to the second (51 more sites on 115) and a further 11 percent to the third. Counts for the other rounds were not found, so the rest of the 900 cannot be itemised. For the last round the PTA lists what inspectors found: power supply and backup redundancy problems, equipment deficiencies, battery and generator faults, safety concerns involving fibre optic cables, and administrative shortcomings. It names no operator and gives no count for each fault.
What the faults suggest
A drive test is a snapshot: a vehicle with a test phone logs signal strength, call setup, dropped calls and data speed along a road. It shows outdoor coverage on the route and says little about indoor signal or about a site that fails for an hour each evening.
The faults the PTA lists are the kind that produce exactly that pattern. A site on a weak battery bank and a dead generator goes dark when mains power fails, and coverage that looks fine on a planning map becomes a hole. A damaged fibre link can cut the backhaul that carries a site's traffic even when the radio is working. Adding towers fixes neither.
The PTA has imposed Rs3.41 billion in penalties on mobile operators over four years for quality of service and coverage failures, with 20 warning letters and 86 show cause notices. An operator found in breach must file a root cause analysis, a time bound corrective plan and a compliance report within 30 days.
Publishing drive test results by operator and route would let subscribers see who fixed what. For now, the chairman's review and the coverage gap reports due to operators are the next steps, and neither has a date.
