KARACHI: Pakistan will roll out 5G mobile phone services in the country by December 2022, Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunications Syed Amin Ul Haque said on Sunday just weeks after he made Islamabad’s first trial 5G call to Beijing at an event on November 4.
Pakistan has 169 million mobile phone users and some 85 million 3G/4G subscribers currently. Its telecom market is dominated by Jazz, backed by Netherlands-based Veon Ltd; Telenor Pakistan, backed by Norway’s state-controlled Telenor; Zong, owned by China Mobile; and Ufone, which is controlled by state-owned Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd.
“December 2022 is the ideal date [to launch 5G services] as it would take one to two years to improve infrastructure and increase optic fiber penetration across the country,” Haque said, explaining that since 5G services worked on a network of fiber optic cables, the government had to first lay down this “basic requirement.”
Other emerging market countries like Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, India and Sri Lanka are also planning to launch 5G services in the next two years.
According to a June 2020 report by the GSM Association (GSMA), an industrial body representing mobile network operators across the world, 5G services are forecast to grow from zero connections in 2018 to 2.8 billion connections by 2025.
Around $67 billion will be spent on mobile networks in South Asia between 2019 and 2025, with $3.5 billion in Pakistan alone, according to the GSMA report.
The GSMA also estimates that by 2023, the economic contribution of the mobile industry in Pakistan will reach $24 billion, or 6.6 percent of GDP.
“5G is close to being deployed on a large scale globally, and its commercialization is steadily advancing,” Wang Hua, Chairman & CEO of Zong, said in a statement after the trial call between Islamabad and Beijing earlier this month. “Our 5G test call takes Pakistan one step closer to the 5G era where possibilities are endless for the users.”
Mobile phone operators also said 5G services would “revolutionize” life in Pakistan.
“4G changes life and 5G changes society,” Maheen Akhtar, Head of Public Relations at Zong, told Arab News. “It will stimulate social-economic growth, promote smart connectivity and cloud-network synergy, and support the networked, digital, and intelligent transformation of traditional industries. It will also create new opportunities for social development and promote the open sharing and overall utilization of resources, rational allocation and efficient collaboration.”
Though Pakistan’s telecoms sector has grown rapidly over the past decade, the market is hyper-competitive and news of plans for 5G comes as mobile operators also fear a tougher period ahead amid a slumping economy and rising inflation that is expected to lead to belt tightening by the country’s 220 million people.
Pakistan’s tax payments and fees for mobile consumers and operators are currently among the highest in Asia. Consumers have to pay around six kinds of levies while operators pay 11, including a 30 percent Corporate Income Tax. A tax directory issued by the Federal Board of Revenue for tax year 2017 listed Telenor and Jazz among the country’s top corporate taxpayers.
But Minister Haque said taxes would be cut “through policy measures” in the next few weeks.
“Definitely, I think the taxes should be minimum,” he said, adding that a policy in this regard was with the Economic Coordination Committee and would next go to cabinet for discussion.
“You will see in the next few weeks,” he said, “a clear taxation policy will come out through in which the taxes are being reduced.”