The Special Communications Organisation has put forward a proposal to overhaul its existing billing infrastructure across Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, citing an outdated and slow legacy system that has increasingly become a bottleneck for revenue collection and service delivery as subscriber numbers in these regions have grown exponentially over the years. The proposed project, estimated at a total cost of Rs. 1.888 billion, is planned for implementation over the period spanning 2025 to 2028, with Rs. 945 million earmarked for the 2026-27 fiscal year alone. The proposal is currently in the planning stage and awaiting formal approval from the Ministry of Information Technology, with the Special Communications Organisation in the process of completing the necessary documentation to advance the project through official channels.
The scale of the challenge the upgrade is intended to address becomes clear when viewed against the growth trajectory of the organisation’s subscriber base in the two regions. Subscriber numbers have expanded from approximately 5,000 to over 2.2 million — a transformation that the existing billing infrastructure was never designed to accommodate. The outdated system has resulted in delays in bill generation and significant disruptions to revenue collection, both of which have downstream consequences for the organisation’s ability to invest in and sustain quality service delivery across some of Pakistan’s most geographically demanding terrain. The proposed replacement, described as a Convergent Billing System, is designed to consolidate multiple service streams — including mobile, landline, long-distance calls, cloud services, and fiber internet — into a single unified platform, eliminating the fragmentation that currently characterises the organisation’s billing operations. The new system is projected to support up to 4 million users, providing headroom for continued subscriber growth well beyond the current base.
Beyond billing accuracy and speed, officials have highlighted broader operational and strategic benefits expected from the upgrade. The new platform is anticipated to improve customer service responsiveness, provide management with more reliable data for decision-making, and strengthen the overall telecom infrastructure of Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan at a time when both regions are increasingly attracting domestic and international tourism. Reliable, efficient, and modern telecommunications infrastructure is widely recognised as a foundational requirement for supporting local businesses and the hospitality sector in these areas, and the Convergent Billing System is being framed as a step toward making that foundation more robust for the years ahead.
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