The federal government’s much-publicised plan to make Islamabad the country’s first free Wi-Fi city has stalled significantly past its original delivery timeline, with public spaces across the capital still without free internet access more than six months after the project was supposed to have been completed. The initiative, being executed jointly by the Capital Development Authority and the National Telecommunication Corporation, was originally scheduled for completion by December 30, 2025, a deadline that passed without the service becoming operational, leaving citizens and commuters in key areas of the federal capital waiting for connectivity that had been publicly committed to.
Under the project’s original design, authorities planned to install 30 Wi-Fi hotspots across key markets, public parks, and Metro Bus stations in Islamabad, with the primary goal of providing citizens with free connectivity and improving digital accessibility in a city that serves as the seat of the federal government and a daily destination for hundreds of thousands of residents and visitors. The scale of the deployment, while modest in absolute terms, carried symbolic weight as a demonstration of the government’s Digital Nation Pakistan vision and its commitment to making public internet access a standard urban amenity rather than a privilege tied to private data subscriptions.
The delay prompted direct intervention from Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who directed the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication to complete the delayed project immediately, emphasising that easy and high-speed internet access is an absolute necessity for implementing the Digital Nation Pakistan vision and for driving greater digital inclusion across the country. Federal Minister for Information Technology Shaza Fatima Khawaja subsequently provided assurances that the government will complete the project soon and confirmed that her ministry had already initiated steps to expedite the remaining work following the Prime Minister’s directive.
Despite those assurances, sources with knowledge of the project’s status indicate that citizens will need to wait further still, with the Prime Minister’s formal inauguration of the free Wi-Fi service now expected to take place after Eid al-Adha rather than in the immediate term. The absence of a firm, publicly committed new deadline raises questions about the project’s execution management and the coordination between the Capital Development Authority and the National Telecommunication Corporation, both of which share responsibility for delivering an initiative that has now become a visible symbol of the gap between government digital ambitions and on-the-ground implementation reality.
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