ISLAMABAD (The Thursday Times) — The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has found that 12 of the 28 local broadband networks it inspected between July and September fell short on at least one quality benchmark, with overloaded capacity and patchy uptime among the problems.
The regulator’s network-end Quality of Service survey covered 23 fixed broadband operators in 21 cities and checked each against seven indicators: bandwidth utilisation, core and access network availability, local and international latency, jitter, and download and upload speeds. Sixteen of the 28 city-by-city entries met all seven.
The weakest result was Pace Telecom and Broadcasting’s network in Abbottabad, which met only four of the seven indicators. Its core network was available 99.73% of the time against a required 99.9%, and its access network 97.13% against 99%. The same company’s Swat network met six of seven.
Falcon Broadband in Vehari recorded jitter, the variation in delay that disrupts video calls and online gaming, of 40.61 milliseconds against a limit of 15.
Other operators with at least one indicator needing improvement were Net-Cloud Telecom in Dadu, New Millennium Network in Haripur, TES Media and GH Wireless Internet Service in Islamabad, Gerry’s Information Technology in Karachi, Khyber Internet Services Provider in Mardan, Wateen WiMax in Quetta, Multinet Pakistan in Rawalpindi, D3 Advertising and Communications in Shaheed Benazirabad, and Wavecomm in Usta Muhammad.
Every operator met the latency limits, below 40 milliseconds locally and 110 milliseconds on international land links, and the minimum speeds of 4Mbps for downloads and 2Mbps for uploads. But bandwidth use on some networks went above the 80% ceiling, which the regulator said could slow connections at peak hours.
The PTA said the survey, carried out by its Enforcement Division at operators’ network operation centres, covered DSL, copper, and fibre networks under the Fixed Broadband Quality of Service Regulations, 2022. Operators that fell short have been told to take corrective steps, including adding capacity, improving availability, and cutting jitter. The regulator also ran user-end surveys of what subscribers experience and has put the full results on its website.
Separately, six satellite internet firms, Starlink among them, are still waiting for licences to operate in Pakistan.
