Broadband technology: Warid Telecom announces launch of LTE services

Rollout to begin from six major cities of the country.

KARACHI: Long in the headlines for the much-awaited launch of its Long Term Evolution (LTE) services, Warid Telecom finally announced a formal rollout of its mobile broadband in six major cities from Friday.

As per the official announcement, the company will start its LTE services from Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Karachi, Faisalabad and Gujranwala and offer free trials to its customers for seven days.

A Pakistani subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Group, Warid Telecom was the only cellular service provider in the country that refrained from participating in the spectrum auction of licences for third-generation (3G) and 4G mobile technologies held in April this year.

Later, the company announced that it would launch its LTE services, saying it had a technology-neutral licence. With the formal launch, Warid will shift from the existing 2G or GSMA network to the much-advanced LTE network.



It will be investing around $500 million over the next five years to expand the network across the country along with its technology partner, Ericsson, the company said in a statement.

“I am confident that with the trust and loyalty of our customers, Warid Telecom will rise to stellar heights within this new telecoms paradigm,” said Warid CEO Muneer Farooqui, who claimed that the company possesses the country’s largest post-paid customer base.

The company is aggressively working to further expand
its LTE footprint in Pakistan and aims to cover 10 more cities within the next 10 months and 20 cities in the next 20 months, the statement said.



Warid Telecom had a subscriber base of 13 million or less than 10% of Pakistan’s 139 million cellphone subscriptions as of May 2014, making it the smallest operator by subscriber base. However, it enjoys a large and loyal base of corporate or post-paid clients and is known mainly as a network dominated by urban customers.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 26^th,  2014.

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