Mobile phone users in Pakistan reached at 129.85 million at the end of February 2016, after five mobile phone companies added a combined user base of 1.8 million customers during the reported month, according to data released by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) here on Monday. Mobilink leads the charts with 37.48 million customers while Telenor is closing in the gap with 36.02 million subscribers. However, after planned merger of Mobilink and Warid, Mobilink will be able to widen the lead with more than 48 million post-merger customers.
Zong has 24.86 million customers at the end of February 2016 whereas Ufone stood with 20.59 million customers till the time. Warid has a total of 10.9 million customers. However, the data shows that the number of 3G/4G users reached 26.19 million by end February, 2016 as compared to 24.709 million by end January 2016 showing a reasonable growth in modern mobile broadband services with each passing month.
The number of 4G (Zong) users jumped from 416,676 subscribers in January 2016 subscribers to 481,730 by end February. According to PTA, the number of Zong, Mobilink, Ufone and Telenor reached 5,430,155, 7,930,515, 4,879,653 and 7,213,512 3G users respectively by February 2016. Warid LTE subscriber reached 257,726 during this period. Mobile teledensity increased from 66.2 percent to 66.7 percent and broadband subscribers increased from 27,859,752 to 29,323,215 during the period under review.