The regulator’s chairman led a live signal test on Islamabad and Rawalpindi’s showcase roads, but published no data. Its quarterly surveys tell a patchier story
ISLAMABAD, Nov 5 (Focus Pakistan) - Pakistan’s telecom regulator sent its chairman, three board members and a group of journalists onto the busiest roads of Islamabad and Rawalpindi to test mobile signals live. Its verdict: “excellent”.
Yet the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) put out no figures behind that verdict. Download speeds, call-drop rates, scores for each operator: none came with the announcement.
Three teams drove designated routes at the same time. They covered the New Islamabad International Airport, T-Chowk, Constitution Avenue, Club Road, Murree Road, Rawal Road and the area around the old airport.
Survey staff and reporters made live voice calls and ran data sessions along the way. PTA Chairman Major General (retd) Hafeez Ur Rehman led the exercise. Three PTA members rode along: Muhammad Naveed, Dr Khawar Siddique Khokhar and Muhammad Jahanzeb Rahim. So did people from the IT ministry. The mobile operators sent their own representatives too.
PTA says it wanted to see how networks actually behave for users: whether signals hold, whether service stays up, and where things fall short. First results? Excellent, according to the regulator, at least in the areas it covered.
What PTA’s Own Scorecards Say
The regulator’s quarterly surveys paint a patchier picture of the rest of the country. Those surveys run for weeks, not hours. For the April-June round, PTA teams drove more than 2,000 kilometres over a month.
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In that survey of 11 cities, no operator met every benchmark, and mobile broadband emerged as the weakest area. Jazz met all 55 voice indicators without a single miss. Telenor recorded the lowest overall compliance, meeting 112 indicators and missing 20. In Quetta, Telenor’s compliance fell to 58%.
The January-March round, covering 18 cities, ended the same way. No operator hit 100% compliance. Zong scored 93% and Ufone 89%, while Telenor came last at 78%. Telenor’s gaps now sit with PTCL, which completed its takeover of the operator at the end of 2025.
Fixed broadband has its own problems. In the regulator’s April-June broadband survey, PTCL and NTC missed the minimum speed threshold of 4 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up.
Customer service fares worse. PTA’s survey for the last quarter of 2025 found that no mobile operator met the deadline for resolving consumer complaints.
To be fair to the twin cities, Rawalpindi already performs well. In the April-June survey, all four operators met all 12 city-level compliance indicators there.
Catching Up With the World
Global data shows how far the country has had to climb. Through 2025, Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index kept Pakistan near the bottom of its mobile rankings, with median downloads hovering around 25 Mbps.
Those figures predate 5G. The regulator auctioned 5G spectrum in March, raising about $507 million, and Jazz switched on 5G in key cities soon after.
As an early focus of that rollout, Islamabad offers an important test of whether network upgrades are reaching people’s everyday connections.
What Comes Next
PTA said it would keep up regular field monitoring, rely on evidence-based assessments and work closely with operators to improve service quality.
Publishing the raw data from the twin-city drive would help consumers judge that promise. So would a timeline for fixing the gaps its own quarterly reports keep finding.
PTA says Islamabad’s main roads performed excellently. Consumers in Quetta, Sukkur and elsewhere are still waiting for comparable results.
