Pakistan’s digital story has long been written in the language of fintech adoption, broadband expansion, and mobile penetration. Yet beneath the surface lies a quieter current: the rise of photonic technologies. Light, guided and harnessed, is becoming the substrate of connectivity, diagnostics, and research. Photonics in Pakistan is no longer just a lab pursuit; it is the unseen infrastructure binding the country to global networks and quietly shaping its industrial and scientific future.
The most visible evidence lies in telecoms. PTCL in October 2024 completed Pakistan’s first 800 Gbps-per-wavelength deployment, rolling out an 800G WDM system using Huawei’s Super C+L spectrum and flexible-grid switching. That milestone moved Pakistan’s backbone optics into parity with regional peers and offered headroom for the exponential demand that comes with cloud, AI, and smart city grids. International bandwidth has been anchored by Transworld Associates, which owns the TW1 submarine cable and operates additional landing stations through partnerships with global consortia, ensuring redundancy and resilience for Pakistan’s international data traffic.
Local manufacturing capacity is slowly moving beyond dependence on imports. PTCL Cables, operating a facility in Hub, produces optical fiber cables across multiple categories—FTTH, ADSS, direct-buried—alongside copper and conduit. Premier Cables in Karachi manufactures fiber products to international standards and is listed with the Fiber Optic Association. Litech Pakistan supplies operators with fiber cables and accessories at scale, often integrated with turnkey vendors like Huawei and ZTE. Together, these companies represent an embryonic but crucial base of domestic manufacturing capability that can be scaled to meet future demand.
Photonics is not confined to cables and backbones. In consumer-medical optics, Meta-Tech Vision stands out as one of Pakistan’s leading ophthalmic manufacturers, producing digital lenses and advanced coatings that feed into the regional eye-care industry. While upstream materials and technology remain largely imported, the presence of a domestic player in precision lens production adds another dimension to the photonic value chain.
The experimental and research frontier is alive in universities and labs. At LUMS, the Bio-Agri-Photonics Lab is building portable optical sensors to test milk and water contamination and to diagnose tuberculosis non-invasively, with Ignite funding underpinning the effort. COMSATS University sustains a lasers and quantum optics group that experiments with ultrafast optics, thin-film deposition, and Nd:YAG systems. NUST’s Optical Networks and Technologies Lab focuses on SDON, transport networks, and industrial internet applications, advancing designs for the next generation of photonic infrastructure.
Applied photonics research in Pakistan is not theoretical. Raman spectroscopy combined with machine learning for TB diagnostics has been published by local researchers, showing how photonics intersects with AI for practical health solutions. At the same time, the translation gap remains real: few of these projects have moved into widespread clinical or industrial deployment, constrained by regulatory hurdles, fragmented policy, and limited industrial absorption capacity.
The global backdrop highlights what is at stake. SPIE’s 2025 report estimates photonics-enabled products surpassed $2.5 trillion in 2024, while Photonics21’s market study calculates the sector’s compound annual growth rate at nearly seven percent. Photonics underlies semiconductors, data center interconnects, healthcare imaging, precision manufacturing, and secure communications. For Pakistan, its current strengths—fiber cable manufacturing, ophthalmic lenses, university research—are insertion points into this massive global value chain.
The challenge is scale and coordination. Without deliberate industrial policy, Pakistan risks remaining a consumer of high-value photonic subsystems—lasers, integrated photonic circuits, precision optics—while contributing mainly low- to mid-value cables and lenses. What could change that trajectory is tighter integration: aligning Ignite-style grants with translational commercialization, encouraging procurement and pilot adoption from state and defense bodies, and building consortia between universities and industry to accelerate the move from lab to market.
Photons don’t respect borders. They cut through glass, bounce through cables, carry a billion conversations without noticing whether they’re in Lahore or London. What matters is how Pakistan decides to catch and bend that light—whether it keeps importing the tools of the future or starts building them. The cables under Karachi’s seabed, the labs tinkering in Lahore, the factories rolling fiber in Hub—none of these are trivia. They are fragments of a photonic map that, if anyone cares enough to connect it, could become the foundation for Pakistan’s next technological leap.
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Photonics in Pakistan: From Fiber Backbones to Quantum Horizons
