A World Bank report has shed light on the depth of Pakistan’s broadband deficit, identifying a set of structural bottlenecks that are limiting broadband quality, blocking service integration, and effectively placing the country’s 5G transition on an indefinite hold. While mobile broadband remains the dominant form of internet access across Pakistan, the fixed broadband segment, which is critical for enterprise productivity and data-intensive applications, remains severely underdeveloped. Pakistan currently has only 2.6 million Fiber to the Home-based fixed broadband connections nationwide, with Punjab accounting for approximately half of that total at around 1.3 million users.
The fiberization of mobile towers sits at the heart of the 5G problem. Pakistan currently operates approximately 58,000 mobile towers, yet the industry has fiberized only 17.9 percent of them, a shortfall that severely affects backhaul capacity, degrades the quality and reliability of mobile internet services, restricts the effective use of existing 4G networks, and entirely blocks any meaningful transition to 5G. Fixed broadband availability also remains deeply uneven, with large and small operators serving urban areas while rural regions rely primarily on mobile connectivity supported by the Universal Service Fund. A third category of underserved zones also exists, consisting of urban locations with viable long-term demand but no fixed broadband presence at all, areas that represent a significant opportunity for private investment but remain unattractive due to regulatory inefficiencies and steep upfront deployment costs.
Fragmented Right-of-Way practices act as a major deterrent to private investment in last-mile fibre deployment. While federal and provincial governments have introduced reforms including selective Right-of-Way fee waivers, last-mile connectivity in Punjab depends on local governments and private housing societies that rely heavily on these fees to cover reinstatement, supervision, and administrative costs, meaning blanket waivers risk undermining local government financial sustainability. Punjab has responded with a more calibrated approach, introducing a time-bound reimbursement mechanism alongside a digital platform to streamline approvals, addressing investor concerns without disrupting local fiscal operations.
On the digital payments side, Pakistan has built key public infrastructure components around digital identity and instant payments, with the Raast payment system handling peer-to-peer and person-to-merchant transactions at significant scale. However, person-to-government and government-to-person payments remain heavily fragmented, limiting the effectiveness of digital public service delivery and leaving provincial governments struggling to integrate payments with service platforms, invoicing, and compliance systems. Punjab again stands out as a relative leader in digital governance, deploying an approach to Artificial Intelligence in the public sector that deliberately avoids building foundational large language models in favour of inference-led, application-level solutions tailored to local languages and administrative workflows, delivering efficiency gains while maintaining public sector data sovereignty. Taken together, the report paints a picture of a country with pockets of genuine digital progress but systemic infrastructure gaps that will need sustained policy attention and private investment before 5G becomes a practical reality.
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