The total broadband subscription in the country has surpassed 18 million with mobile internet penetration showing a reasonable growth till end of July this year.
The number of 3G and 4G users reached 14.6 million till month of July, constituting around 81 per cent of the country’s total broadband subscriber base. This translates to an increase of 8.3 per cent over 13.5 million of preceding month, statistics released by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) showed on Sunday. Similarly, the number of broadband connections in the country also witnessed 7 per cent increase to 18 million as compared to 16.9 million in preceding month.
Almost all of this growth is due to the roll-out of high-speed mobile internet which was introduced in April last year. The Cellular Mobile Operators (CMOs) overall user base, which decreased by 18 per cent to 114.7 million subscribers in fiscal year 2015 amid the biometric verification drive, also showed signs of recovery in the first month of current fiscal year.
The number of cellular subscribers increased 1.5 per cent to 116.4 million at the end of July. The data cleaning exercise had brought down annual cellular mobile tele-density from a peak of 76.5 per cent in 2014 to 61 per cent at the end of June this year.
With regard to market share, the data showed that market positions of five mobile phone operators, however, remained the same as Mobilink ended at the top with 34 million subscriptions at end of July, followed by Telenor Pakistan, which finished second with 32.5 million users in the same period.
China Mobile Pakistan (Zong), Ufone and Warid were third, fourth and fifth with 22 million, 18 million and 10 million users respectively. The mobile broadband category was dominated by Telenor Pakistan which boasted over 4.7 million 3G users at the end of July, up 13 per cent compared to 4.2 million of the previous month. It was followed by Mobilink that increased its 3G users by over 8 per cent to almost 4 million compared to 3.7 million of the preceding month.
Zong remained third in the mobile broadband with 3 million users on its 3G network and 132,502 on the 4G platform. Ufone’s 3G user base improved slightly to 2.6 million while Warid boasted 121,602 users on its 4G/Long Term Evolution (LTE) network at the end of July.
The data showed that till July, the number of technology-wise broadband subscribers included DSL 1,480,672 users, HFC 43,362 users, WiMax 487,582 users, FTTH 19,490 users, EvDO 1,334,725 users and the number of others users was 6,089.