Pakistan’s IT minister says 5G now has around 1.8 million subscribers, and that average internet speeds are 60% higher than 30 months ago. Shaza Fatima Khawaja gave the numbers at the Margalla Dialogue on Tuesday, 10 November. They are her own claims, and she named no survey or measurement behind them.
Her case rests on three changes. First, spectrum: an auction that offered 480 MHz, which she called the biggest the country has held, took the total on offer from 274 MHz to over 750 MHz. Second, capacity: traffic has risen by two terabits a second and live capacity sits near seven terabits, helped by two new undersea cables. Third, fibre: the connection count has doubled, from 3 million to above 6 million.
The 5G number follows from the auction. The minister described 5G as launched, and operators have begun selling hardware: Jazz’s 5G device went on sale at its stores on 2 November for Rs. 18,000.
Much of the rest of her talk was about AI. She cited a forecast of a $4.8 trillion AI economy by 2033 and argued that it will reshape work instead of ending it, with heavy users of AI becoming as much as 100 times more productive than peers of similar skill. She also repeated the government’s Digital Nation Pakistan goal of expanding digital infrastructure.
Speed claims like this are easiest to test on your own line. Run a speed test on your operator’s network at a few hours of the day, and keep the results for comparison when new figures are published for your area or operator.
