Introduction
In our latest look at the mobile network experience in Pakistan, Zong continues to hold the lion’s share of our awards, having held onto Video Experience, Upload Speed Experience, 4G Availability and 4G Coverage Experience, as well as now winning Games Experience. As far as the award table is concerned, the only other changes since our last report in July are that Jazz and Zong are now joint winners for Voice App Experience and Download Speed Experience.
Compared to our previous report, our users on most networks have reported an uplift in their mobile network experience — except our Ufone users who saw declines in five out of seven metrics. Users saw significant improvements on our speed metrics — Download Speed Experience (1.9% to 17.7%) and Upload Speed Experience (4.8% to 13.9%) — as well as our 4G Availability (2.1-2.5 percentage points) and 4G Coverage Experience (2.1% to 7.2%) metrics.
Our data also shows there is a lot of room for improvement on our experiential measures, especially Games Experience and Voice App Experience. The typical Voice App Experience of our Pakistani users ranges from Poor to Very Poor, while their Games Experience is Very Poor across all four operators. With the increasing usage of OTT voice app services and multiplayer mobile gaming in Pakistan, these experiential measures are becoming an increasingly important aspect of users’ mobile network experience.
In the future, as the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) is reportedly planning to auction spectrum in 1800 MHz and 2100 MHz band, it will be interesting to see how this will alter the country’s mobile experience landscape.
In this report, we've analyzed our data gathered in the 90 days ending on 29 December 2020 to see how Pakistan’s four national operators — Jazz, Ufone, Zong and Telenor — measure up. As this period includes the introduction of COVID-19 measures (partial lockdown) in some parts of the country, it also indicates to what degree the country’s mobile experience has weathered the resulting changes in people’s data consumption habits and locations. Overall the mobile experience in Pakistan has been largely resilient given the challenges everyone has been facing since 2020.