PTA's live test in the twin cities produced one reported speed, a 650 Mbps peak, and no averages
PTA led three teams across Islamabad and Rawalpindi on 5 November and says the early results were excellent. The one speed reported was a peak, and PTA's own quarterly survey shows what a stronger test looks like.
On 5 November the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority put its chairman, members, directors general, ministry officials, mobile operators and journalists on the roads of Islamabad and Rawalpindi to test mobile networks live. PTA's release says the initial results showed excellent performance. The only number attached to the day so far is a peak speed.
Three teams worked at the same time along set routes. They covered the New Islamabad International Airport, T Chowk, Constitution Avenue, Club Road, Murree Road, Rawal Road and the area around the Old Airport, making live data sessions and voice calls at different points. The release names no operator, gives no measurement and does not say how many tests were run.
ProPakistani reported that Jazz reached download peaks of up to 650 Mbps. The same report puts Jazz at 1,237 5G sites nationwide, 126 of them in Islamabad and 64 in Rawalpindi, and records a shorter survey on 31 October led by PTA's director general for enforcement. Together the two cities hold 190 of those sites, about 15 percent of Jazz's 5G network (190 divided by 1,237), so a good result here says little about the other 85 percent. Jazz's 650 Mbps is also a figure for one operator, and PTA has not published a matching number for any other.
What a peak speed tells you
A peak is the best reading in a run, not the typical one. It is reached when the phone has a strong signal, the cell is lightly loaded and the network can use its widest channel. The arithmetic shows why it flatters. At 650 Mbps a 1 GB file, which is 8,000 megabits, downloads in about 12 seconds. At 20 Mbps, an illustrative speed for a phone at a busy junction or indoors, the same file takes about 6 minutes 40 seconds. Both readings can come from the same network on the same afternoon.
What customers feel is the low end of the distribution: the speed at the 10th percentile, the share of calls that connect and hold, the share of data sessions that fail. Those need hundreds or thousands of samples per area, taken at random times, indoors and outdoors. A convoy tested with the regulator, the operators and the press present is a good way to find faults, since engineers can be sent to fix them, and a weak way to measure typical service.
How PTA's quarterly survey compares
PTA does run the larger version. Its Q2 2026 survey, published on 18 September, covered April to June. In 11 major cities it ran about 27,300 voice and SMS tests and analysed about 0.19 million broadband samples, which is roughly 2,500 voice and SMS tests and 17,000 broadband samples for each city. Focused and rural areas added 3,300 voice and SMS tests and 24,000 broadband samples, and Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan added 4,100 and 3,960.
Those results are scored against licence parameters. TechJuice's tally of the reports gives Jazz 130 of 132 checks, Zong 128, Ufone 121 and Telenor 112. Mobile broadband was the weakest area, with industry wide compliance of about 85 percent, and Telenor met the 4G coverage benchmark in only 5 of the 11 cities. PTA's release says it has started legal action against the operators concerned for non compliance. On that tally Jazz passed about 98 percent of its checks and Telenor about 85 percent, a gap of roughly 14 points. A live test that publishes no operator figures cannot show a gap like that, and that gap is what a customer choosing a network would want to know.
What the twin cities test can and cannot show
It can show that the main roads are covered. It cannot show whether side streets, apartment blocks or basements get the same service, which is where people use their phones. As a general property of radio, higher frequency 5G signals lose the most strength indoors, so a drive test is least informative about the places where 5G is hardest to deliver.
A peak reading favours the operator with the widest channels and the densest 5G. It says nothing for operators with weaker networks, or for customers off the main roads, until figures are published by operator, as the quarterly survey does.
PTA published the Q2 survey 80 days after the quarter ended on 30 June. The same lag would put the Q3 results around 19 December, the next published test of whether the twin cities improvement shows up in medians and failure rates rather than in one peak.
