If your phone drops calls or crawls on data in Islamabad or Rawalpindi, PTA says it checked the problem in person on Thursday 5 November and came away satisfied. The regulator described mobile internet and voice service in the twin cities as excellent after a field survey led by its chairman, Major General (retd) Hafeez Ur Rehman.
Those are initial results only. PTA has not published speed figures, call-drop counts or a comparison between Jazz, Zong, Telenor and Ufone, so the word “excellent” is the regulator’s own summary of what its teams saw and heard.
According to the state news agency’s copy of the PTA statement, three teams drove separate routes at the same time: the New Islamabad International Airport, T-Chowk, Constitution Avenue, Club Road, Murree Road, Rawal Road and the area around the old airport. They made voice calls and used mobile data on the way. Three PTA members, the director general enforcement and enforcement officers joined, along with representatives of the IT ministry, the mobile operators and the media.
The visit follows PTA’s direction in September, when it told operators to close coverage gaps in both cities by the end of October, including along Kashmir Highway and Islamabad Expressway, by building new sites where needed and by using new 5G spectrum bands. Operators that missed the mark were warned of penalties. PTA’s enforcement director had already run a shorter round of drive tests on 31 October, the day the deadline ended.
A caveat for readers: the exercise was run with operator staff and reporters on board, along routes PTA designated beforehand. Those were main roads and the airport, not the residential lanes, basements or upper floors where many people lose signal, so a good result on the route does not guarantee a good result at your door.
If calls still fail at home or on your daily route, note the place, time and operator and complain to the operator first, then to PTA if it is not resolved. On 31 October PTA’s enforcement director said the authority would give operators coverage gap reports and expect the listed problems to be fixed immediately.
A drive test is not PTA’s formal yardstick. The regulator also commissions independent quality-of-service surveys each quarter, whose city reports list operator-by-operator results against set benchmarks, and those are the numbers to compare when PTA publishes the next round.
PTA said the survey was meant to measure actual customer experience and to find service gaps still needing work, and that it will keep monitoring in the field. The regulator did not say whether any operator is facing action, or whether similar surveys are planned for other cities.
