PTA has proposed new measures to accelerate telecom tower installations across Pakistan as the country advances toward the commercial rollout of fifth-generation services, citing the dangerously slow pace of tower deployment as a major obstacle standing between the spectrum auction milestone achieved in March 2026 and a functioning nationwide network. According to PTA, only 9 of the 15 licensed telecom tower providers have managed to install towers anywhere in the country, and of those nine, only six companies have reached the threshold of 50 or more towers installed, a figure that falls significantly short of what a credible fifth-generation infrastructure base requires.
Under the proposed framework, which PTA has put out for stakeholder consultation, licence holders will be required to install a minimum of 10 telecom towers during the first year following the issuance of their licence, with the obligation expanding to a cumulative total of at least 50 towers within a five-year period from the date their certificate is issued. The phased structure is designed to create consistent, enforceable progress milestones rather than leaving deployment timelines to the discretion of individual licence holders, some of whom have been sitting on their licences without making meaningful infrastructure investments. PTA stated that the proposed conditions are aimed squarely at improving the rate of tower deployment and providing the physical network foundation on which reliable fifth-generation coverage and performance depend.
The consultation process is now open, with stakeholders invited to submit their feedback and suggestions to PTA by May 18, 2026, before the regulator finalises the rollout targets and associated conditions. The move reflects a broader recognition that Pakistan’s fifth-generation ambitions cannot be sustained by spectrum allocation alone, and that without a substantially denser and more widely distributed tower network, the performance promises associated with fifth-generation technology will remain difficult to deliver at scale to the consumers and enterprises that the rollout is intended to serve.
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