On WhatsApp alone, Pakistan sees around 12 billion messages and one billion calls a day, according to figures PTA chairman Hafeez ur Rehman gave MPs on Tuesday. For YouTube he cited 96 million users and about 560 million videos watched daily.
He was briefing the IT committee of the National Assembly on 3 November. TikTok, he said, has 100 million accounts here and about 150 million people watch or upload clips on it, while WhatsApp has roughly 100 million accounts.
The TikTok pair of numbers is the odd one out. A gap of 50 million between accounts and viewers could mean many people watch without signing in, but the committee was not told that, so it stays a guess. YouTube’s 560 million daily views is a count of videos watched, not of people, which is why the per-user average below lands so low.
Divide the totals and the habit looks heavy: on those numbers an average WhatsApp account sends about 120 messages a day, and an average YouTube user watches about six videos. That is our own arithmetic and it assumes every account is active daily, which is unlikely. The briefing did not say whether ‘users’ means unique people, accounts or monthly active users, and it gave no source for the claim that Pakistan is among the top countries for YouTube viewing.
IT minister Shaza Fatima Khawaja told the same meeting that social media and AI have pushed up data consumption sharply. On 5G, she said about 1.8 million people use it so far, in a rollout that has reached 24 cities. That is a small share beside 100 million WhatsApp accounts. She also credited the current government with holding the 5G spectrum auction.
Outages, she said, also come from theft: entire towers, diesel and generators have gone missing. Backup power matters here because a single dead site cuts off every user in its coverage area.
Call quality was already on the agenda: yesterday an NA panel heard that 4G got worse after 5G arrived, with even WhatsApp calls dropping in Islamabad. The traffic PTA quoted is the load those networks have to carry.
No counting method was given with the numbers, so for now they remain the chairman’s statement to the committee.
