Abdullah Kamran
After years of false starts, legal disputes, and postponements that tested the patience of everyone watching, Pakistan finally held its long-awaited 5G spectrum auction on March 10. The result was the sale of 480MHz of spectrum for 507 million dollars. For a country that had been limping along on just 274MHz of spectrum since 1997, this is not a small thing. It is a genuine turning point, and it deserves to be recognised as such.
The context matters. Bangladesh, a country smaller in both population and land area, was already managing 600MHz. Pakistan, with all its size and economic ambition, was running a digital infrastructure that had not been meaningfully expanded in nearly three decades. Network capacity was constrained. Service quality suffered. Digital connectivity remained concentrated in cities, leaving vast stretches of the country functionally excluded from the modern economy. Every year of delay carried a real cost, not just to telecom operators and investors, but to ordinary citizens whose access to education, healthcare, and economic opportunity increasingly depends on a reliable internet connection.
The June 2024 auction had already collapsed. Another failure would have been damaging in ways that went beyond embarrassment. The government understood this, and to its credit, it delivered. Three major operators, Zong, Jazz, and Ufone, competed vigorously, particularly for the 2,600MHz band, which is central to 5G services. Revenues came in at 507 million dollars, short of the projected 634.5 million for the full 597.2MHz on offer, but the participation was real, the competition was genuine, and the outcome moved the needle. Pakistan’s total available spectrum now stands at 754MHz, a figure that finally puts the country in a position to think seriously about next-generation connectivity rather than simply managing the limitations of the old.
The introduction of the 700MHz band deserves particular attention. This is not a technical footnote. The 700MHz frequency travels farther and penetrates obstacles more effectively than higher bands, making it the most important piece of spectrum for reaching rural communities, remote towns, and underserved areas that higher frequencies simply cannot cover economically. For the first time, Pakistan has the foundational tool to build genuine nationwide connectivity rather than a premium urban service with a thin signal elsewhere. The potential applications are significant: telemedicine reaching district hospitals, digital education extending to schools in remote areas, financial services available to communities that have never had a bank branch nearby.
The disappointment is that only Jazz acquired spectrum in the 700MHz band, taking just 20MHz, while the other operators sat out entirely. This matters because the promise of rural connectivity does not fulfil itself. It requires operators willing to invest in the infrastructure, and that investment depends partly on how much spectrum they hold in the relevant band. One can only hope that future auctions attract broader participation in this critical segment, and that the regulatory framework creates sufficient incentive for operators to see rural coverage as a viable business rather than an obligation to be minimised.
Because here is the harder truth: the auction was the easy part. Holding a competitive bidding process, even after years of delay, is manageable once the political will is assembled and the legal obstacles are cleared. What comes next is far more demanding. Rolling out 5G across a country of Pakistan’s size and complexity requires massive investment in physical infrastructure. Fibre-optic cables must be laid along thousands of kilometres of routes. Towers must be upgraded. Network grids must be made denser, especially in urban cores where 5G’s higher frequency bands require more transmission points to function properly. All of this must happen while telecom operators are navigating a tax and regulatory environment that remains, by most assessments, among the most burdensome in the region.
Affordability is the other structural challenge. A country still wrestling with a deep digital divide, where the gap between urban and rural access is wide and the gap between those who can afford advanced devices and those who cannot is wider still, cannot treat 5G as a premium product for the upper tier of the market. If 5G becomes another service available to the privileged and invisible to everyone else, then the economic and social returns will remain far below what the technology is capable of delivering. Expanding access, reducing the cost of devices, and bringing data prices down to levels that ordinary Pakistanis can actually afford are not afterthoughts. They are conditions for the technology to fulfil its promise.
The government’s role in all of this cannot be passive. Infrastructure of this kind does not emerge from market forces alone, particularly not in countries with Pakistan’s investment climate and geographic challenges. The state must treat 5G as strategic national infrastructure, in the same category as motorways and power transmission networks. That means something specific and concrete: a policy environment that provides genuine regulatory clarity, reduces the burden on operators without sacrificing public revenue irresponsibly, and integrates digital connectivity into the broader national economic plan rather than treating it as a sector to be taxed and regulated in isolation.
The digital agenda must connect to everything else. Industrial policy, education reform, the modernisation of public services, the development of an innovation ecosystem that gives start-ups and research institutions something to work with: all of these depend on connectivity infrastructure, and that infrastructure depends on the quality of the policy surrounding it.
There is also one issue that cannot be left unaddressed. In recent years, Pakistan’s authorities have shown a troubling tendency to view the digital space with suspicion. The imposition of internet controls, attempts to restrict VPN access, and the general disposition to treat connectivity as something to be managed and limited rather than expanded and protected: all of this works directly against the investment environment that 5G requires. Businesses and investors do not commit to long-term infrastructure projects in environments where the rules of the digital road can change arbitrarily and where the state’s instinct is control rather than openness. This must change, and it must change at the level of governing philosophy, not just individual policy decisions.
Pakistan has been slow before. It has missed technological transitions that others caught and capitalised on. The 5G auction is a genuine moment of opportunity. Whether it becomes a foundation for sustained digital growth or another promising start that fades into familiar dysfunction depends entirely on what happens next.
