Number of mobile broadband users increases to 38.269m

695,000 subscriptions added in January alone

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on Monday said that the number of users using third-generation (3G) and fourth-generation (4G) mobile broadband services has increased in the country, amounting to 38.269 million by the end of January against 37.574 million by December 2016.



All mobile phone operators providing mobile broadband services have added 0.695 million subscribers to their network during the month.

Meanwhile, the total number of cellular mobile services subscriptions reached 137.095 million by January 2017, up from 136.489 million by December last year, an increase of around 0.606 million during the period under review.

The latest statistics issued by PTA revealed that total subscribers of Mobilink, after its merger with Warid, reached 51.534 million by January 2017.

Mobilink had a subscriber base of 41.253 million by December 2016 while Warid had 10.27 million users a month ago.

Zong and Telenor subscribers reached 27.496 million and 39.586 million, respectively, by January 2017 as compared to 26.929 million and 39.453 million by December.

Ufone subscribers decreased to 18.478 million from 18.581 million. As per PTA, Mobilink 4G subscribers reached 700,486 by January2017. Warid LTE had a subscriber base of 637,363 by December 2016.



The number of 4G users for Zong jumped from 2.2 million during December 2016 to 2.8 million subscribers by end of January 2017. Tele-density for cellular mobile reached 70% while the number of broadband subscribers reached 40.7 million by January as compared to 40.1 million by December 2016.

Zong outplayed other operators by selling 4G SIMs through its mobile broadband devices.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 28^th, 2017.

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