For all the progress Pakistan has made in expanding internet access, the coverage is still anything but reliable. Forget the mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan or the Thar desert; just try driving to the outskirts of a metropolis and see signal bars disappear on your phone. Ask any operator about it and they would, justifiably so, start a monologue about the underlying reasons. But with satellite, the whole connectivity landscape can change as billionaires (or trillionaires?) pour their money into expanding the technology.
To understand whether they can truly scale, let’s first get a sense of how connected Pakistan is currently. By the end of FY26, the country had roughly 164 million broadband connections, of which an overwhelming majority — 159.5m — were via mobile data. Fixed makes up just 4.4m, roughly a tenth of all households. Within this smaller base, all focus lately has naturally been towards fibre, which has grown from around 100,000 connections in FY19 to 2.88m by June. While the rate of uptake is impressive, the sheer scale is still quite sobering, as under 8pc of households are fiberised.
The problem is economics: laying fibre to a single home runs somewhere between Rs60,000 and Rs120,000, with most of the core inputs — the cable, optical network terminals, splitters — almost entirely imported, then hit with tariffs of around 70 per cent on top. The customer, though, pays only a small fraction, some Rs10,000-15,000 upfront. The internet service provider (ISP) must bear this capex, extending the payback period to eight or 10 years.
