Telecommunications in Pakistan

This prompted the government to take a series of actions to improve the service by opening the telecommunications market.

[2] This was critical, but required a fine balance because opening the market and preserving PTCL were both important for the government.

[1] The centerpiece of the deregulation was the establishment of two categories of basic services licenses: Local loop (LL), for fixed line telecommunication within the 14 PTCL regions, and Long-distance and International (LDI), for connectivity between regions.

In 2006, Etisalat International Pakistan, a wholly owned subsidiary of Emirates Telecommunications Corporation, purchased a 26% stake in PTCL and assumed management control of the company.

[5] The major growth in mobile telephony was triggered by two steps taken by Prof. Atta-ur-Rahman FRS when he was Federal Minister of Science & technology.

Pakistan is connected to the rest of the world through nine submarine cable systems (SEA-ME-WE-3, SEA-ME-WE-4, SEA-ME-WE-5, I-ME-WE, AAE, TW-1, SRG, PEACE and Africa-1) that provide links to Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe;[7] 3 Intelsat satellite earth stations (1 Atlantic Ocean and 2 Indian Ocean); 3 operational international gateway exchanges (2 at Karachi and 1 at Islamabad); and microwave radio relay to neighboring countries.

The tool measured seven dimensions: (i) market entry; (ii) access to scarce resources; (iii) interconnection; (iv) tariff regulation; (v) anti-competitive practices; (vi) universal services; and (vii) quality of service; for the fixed, mobile, and broadband sectors.

However, this conclusion may have been incorrect, as the license fee, at least in the case of renewal by Mobilink GSM, was paid in installments over a period of three years.

In January 2004 the Ministry of Information Technology issued its Mobile Cellular Policy with objectives to:[12] The deregulation bore fruit as international companies Telenor (Norway) and Warid Pakistan set up operations in the country in 2005.

All telecom companies are working to broaden their networks in the Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Northern Areas, which were largely ignored until recently.