PTA, working in partnership with Opensignal, has published its first quarter 2026 mobile quality-of-experience benchmarking report, drawing on 1,230,878,302 data samples collected over 90 days spanning 159 districts to produce what is described as the most comprehensive such exercise published to date. The report measures real end-user experience across five key metrics: download speed, upload speed, video experience, games experience, and time on network, and its findings confirm Zong as Pakistan’s most consistent overall performer, leading on four of the five national metrics while no single operator sweeps every category.
Zong leads on four of five national metrics: download speed at 18.62 megabits per second, upload speed at 7.65 megabits per second, video experience at 47.06 on a 100-point scale, and time on network at 96.82 percent, giving it the most rounded national performance. Jazz is close on video experience at 47.00, within 0.06 points, and second on download speed. Ufone’s standout result is gaming, where its score of 48.22 outpaces Zong’s 44.37 by a meaningful margin, suggesting lower latency and packet-loss characteristics on its network. On coverage experience, Jazz leads with the strongest geographic footprint, while Zong maintains the highest overall connection uptime, indicating that the two networks are differentiated by reach versus reliability rather than one being comprehensively superior to the other.
Telenor finishes last on download speed in thirteen of fifteen cities and on video experience in eleven cities, with its single notable standout being Gwadar, where its time-on-network score of 99.69 percent is the highest figure recorded for any operator in any city in the entire report. The city-level breakdown also exposes the depth of Pakistan’s connectivity inequality. Gwadar, Gilgit, and Muzaffarabad illustrate the scale of the gap, with Gwadar’s best video experience score, Zong’s 40.38, sitting lower than Telenor’s worst video score in Karachi at 43.43, while in Gilgit no operator exceeds 15.30 megabits per second on download and Muzaffarabad records the lowest overall scores in the entire city dataset.
A key concern highlighted in the report is the 11.6 megabit per second speed gap between average and high-end devices, showing that handset quality still heavily affects real internet performance in Pakistan, with network availability remaining stable at 94.21 percent of the time across the country. The findings arrive at a significant moment for Pakistan’s mobile sector, with PTA having recently granted its final no-objection certificate for the Ufone and Telenor merger, a consolidation that will reshape competitive dynamics among the four operators and whose full impact on network quality metrics is likely to become visible in subsequent quarterly reports.
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