Pakistan will have to wait around two more years before fifth-generation mobile coverage reaches every corner of the country, the government has told the National Assembly. The admission came during Friday’s Question Hour, when members pressed officials over slow internet speeds, patchy coverage and the everyday reliability of the mobile networks millions of Pakistanis depend on.
Parliamentary Secretary for Information Technology Sabeen Ghouri told the House that 5G services are currently available in 24 cities. Work is under way to strengthen connectivity in those areas first, she said, before the service is pushed out to further parts of the country. The timeline means that for much of Pakistan, a genuinely nationwide 5G network remains a distant prospect rather than something just around the corner.
The debate was driven in part by complaints from the floor about the state of existing services. Pakistan Peoples Party member Aseefa Bhutto-Zardari raised the poor quality of fourth- and fifth-generation services in Nawabshah and elsewhere, arguing that users need a clear, coordinated plan to lift speeds and deal with their grievances. Her intervention captured a frustration felt well beyond her constituency, where dropped connections and crawling data speeds are a daily complaint even in towns that are nominally covered.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
There was an awkward moment during the session when Abdul Qadir Patel, who was chairing proceedings, asked Ghouri what 5G actually stood for. She appeared unable to answer on the spot, and Aseefa suggested that her colleagues help her out. The exchange, light-hearted on the surface, underlined a deeper unease in the chamber about whether those steering telecom policy fully grasp the technology they are rolling out.
Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl member Noor Alam raised a sharper consumer question, asking why subscribers are being charged for 5G when the service is not reliably available in practice. Patel went further, questioning the rush towards a new generation of technology while the old one still lets people down, and asking pointedly whether 4G had somehow died to make way for its successor. His remark summed up the scepticism in the room: for many users, the promise of faster networks rings hollow while basic coverage remains uneven.
The session ended without a firm date for full coverage, but with a clear message from the government benches that the rollout will be gradual. Until the network reaches beyond its current 24 cities and the quality of existing services improves, the gap between what is advertised and what subscribers actually experience is likely to remain a sore point in parliament and beyond.
