Hats off to the cellular sector for having reached a tele-density of about three-quarters of the population! But it’s not that impressive when one looks below the hood and finds out that high-speed mobile broadband (3G and 4G) connectivity may not be accessible to a significant portion of the population.

Latest data from the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) show that as of January 2019, there were 155 million overall cellular subscribers (2G, 3G and 4G combined). The next-generation mobile services (NGMS), as the PTA refers to mobile broadband, had a subscription total of nearly 63 million as of last month end. That’s just over 40 percent of the overall subscriptions connected to the NGMS networks.

Or more specifically, some 26 percent of all cellular subscriptions are on 3G networks and another 15 percent on 4G networks. On its face, that looks not bad at all. Since the 3G rollout in the summer of 2014, joined six months later by the first 4G deployment, the cellular operators have added more than a million NGMS subscribers every month. The data for Jul-Jan FY19 show a similar gain per month.

At this pace, the remaining subscriptions (which are 2G, totaling 92 million as of January 2019) may take between seven to eight years to migrate to the NGMS networks. Not so fast! It will be simplistic to project this straight-line pointing towards the Northeast, for several reasons. First, this pace of adding a million new NGMS subscriptions every month is unsustainable. Just to keep pace, the operators will need to convert their entire service footprint onto 3G networks – a hard thing to ask. The business case does not exist to incur all that rollout cost to provide a high-end service in low-income and remote geographies.

Second, some years down the road, the telecom authorities may start the regulatory process of introducing the next-generation connectivity standard (5G). The operators may not like it, given they prefer milking the existing investments first. But a regulatory push towards 5G will lead them to focus more on commercializing 5G in the metros and the dense areas surrounding them. That may leave behind tens of millions of folks on the decades old 2G network, even as major cities enjoy 5G.

And third, the “subscriptions” stats mask the true scale of cellular users in this country; hence an analysis based on “subscriptions” alone can be misleading. Few years back, the PTA itself endorsed a GSMA estimate that every telecom user in Pakistan held about two Sims. If one were to discount the current number of subscriptions by a factor of two, the number of “unique” users, as of January 2019, will be 46 million for 2G networks, 20 million for 3G networks and 12 million for 4G networks.

With an estimated 4 to 5 million Pakistanis attaining the age of 15 every year, the number of “unique users” who are not on NGMS networks crosses the 50 million mark. Adjusting for multiple-Sim phenomenon on latest subscription numbers, it appears that over 50 million Pakistani adults don’t even have access to mobile telephony – an alarming stat also found in latest World Bank Findex publication. Suddenly, the officially-reported cellular tele-density (~75%) doesn’t look so impressive, or even credible.