Daily Times

KARACHI: Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) revealed on Friday that Telenor Pakistan has poorest internet speed in Pakistan’s biggest city while the company provides pathetic internet services in Lahore as well.

PTA conducted survey using NEMO Invext-I in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Lahore and Karachi while it had already released results of the survey of Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Peshawar. PTA released Lahore and Karachi’s surveys results on Friday.

According to the user data throughput (Internet speed) quality test conducted by PTA recently in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Lahore and Karachi, Telenor and Ufone happened to be worst performers as Telenor is weakest with 1.78 Mbps internet speed in Karachi among four cellular operators and Ufone was the weakest in Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar.

PTA has recently conducted a survey in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Lahore and Karachi to ascertain whether next generation mobile services (NGMS) and cellular mobile operators (CMO) are providing services as per key performance indicators (KPIs) set in their license and applicable regulations. According to PTA, in terms of providing internet speed, Zong is the best, followed by Mobilink, whereas data throughput of Ufone is the lowest among all NGMS operators.

Country’s biggest city, Karachi, having largest mobile broadband users database, is experiencing insufficient internet speed by almost all CMOs. Contrary to its claims of hefty investment in NGMS roll out, Telenor is the poorest network in Karachi while the company doesn’t provide good speed in other cities too as in Islamabad, Telenor was third with 2.24 Mbps, in Rawalpindi, it has only 2.05 Mbps, in Peshawar the company followed similar trend with 1.53 Mbps internet speed and in Lahore, Telenor was ranked third with 2.23 Mbps, resulting in total average internet speed of the company in Pakistan standing at 1.97 Mbps. Top performer Zong has 7.57 Mbps average speed in all cities whereas Telenors lags behind from top company by 6 Mbps.

However, user data ‘throughput’ of all NGMS operators is higher than the benchmark set in their respective licenses, PTA said.

Similarly, in terms of ‘Grade of Service’, Telenor was poorest among all five CMOs in Karachi, as the company’s grade of services stood at 0.40 percent according to PTA. Ufone topped grade of service test with 2.80 percent while Warid remained second with 2.40 percent ratio of network blocking. Mobilink stands fourth and Zong stands third with 0.98 percent and 1.80 percent grade of service ration respectively. According to overall grade of service quality of all CMOs in all major cities, Warid was on top while Telenor was weakest. However, PTA said that all CMOs are meeting grade of service.

In Lahore, grade of service of Telenor was poorest with only 0.05 percent ratio and Mobilink topped in Lahore with 1.27 percent grade of service.