Pakistan appears set on implementing 3G service this year: Telecommagazine

As mobile users exceed 91 million, two telcos announce further capex investments

by Ek Heng, Asia-Pacific Correspondent

Mon. April 27, 2009

After market talk that began as early as two years ago, Pakistan appears set to implement 3G services in the country this year. Hafeezur Rehman, Federal Secretary for Information Technology and Telecom, was reportedly quoted this week as saying that 3G policy proposals are in the hands of the federal cabinet and spectrum auction are to be held within three or four weeks after approval has been obtained.

Besides the policy decision whether to open bidding to international players or restrict it to existing telcos, he added that the cabinet would make decisions on the base price for spectrum auction. He reiterated that the authorities are mindful of the gloomy market outlook and international recession.

As subscribers continue to grow in the country with the Pakistan Telecom Authority reporting a mobile user base exceeding 91.4 million by end February 2009 and a mobile density of 56.8 percent, incumbent telcos are girding to expand their capital expenditure programs. Based on the number of mobile subscribers, the state-of-play for telcos in Pakistan starts with five main operators: Mobilink (28.2 million subscribers), Telenor Pakistan (19.9 million subscribers), Ufone (19.6 million subscribers) Warid (17.3 million subscribers) and Zong with 5.9 million subscribers.

Telenor Pakistan and Zong to expand networks

Second-tier mobile player, Telenor Pakistan (TP) has selected Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) to conduct its network expansion. Under the terms of the five-year contract, NSN was chosen for the network expansion and infrastructure upgrading program because TP wanted proven expertise in large scale projects with a fast time-to-market, according to Irfan Wahab, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs of Telenor Pakistan.

NSN will install next generation base stations that are easy to deploy, energy efficient and help to optimize network usage as well as provide training for TP’s team. Globally, NSN implemented 200,000 base stations and it activates one base station every three minutes.

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