Pakistan’s Reforms Trajectory: Bold on Paper, Uneven on Ground. Pakistan loves a good launch date. This year it is 5G, promised by the middle of August, trailed by months of press conferences, spectrum auctions and confident statements from telecom operators. On paper, it looks like progress. In practice, it looks like a country switching on a highway before most people own a car that can drive on it.
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Start with the handsets. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) claimed that nearly 80 percent of phones in Pakistan already support the mid-bands needed for 5G. However, telecom industry sources called that number inflated, and it is not hard to see why.
Government data from late 2025 put actual 5G-enabled phones at under 5 percent of the market. Even the more recent, more optimistic figures on smartphone penetration only put usage around 71-72 percent of active connections and a smartphone is not the same thing as a 5G phone.
More than a quarter of Pakistani mobile users are still on 2G, using devices that can barely load a webpage, let alone ride a 5G network. iPhone users, meanwhile, have been told they may have to wait until 2027 before their phones catch up to the network at all.
So who exactly is 5G for, this August? The honest answer is: a small, mostly urban slice of the population that can afford a Rs 100,000-plus handset. Everyone else gets a rollout ceremony and a network they cannot use. The one silver lining regulators point to that 4G speeds will improve as an indirect benefit is real, but it is also an admission that the headline technology is not for most Pakistanis yet.
Now layer the eSIM push on top. The PTA has just finalized a friendlier eSIM policy, capping the issuance fee at Rs 1,500 and allowing ten free transfers between compatible devices. It is a sensible, consumer-facing move.
But it runs into the same wall as 5G: an eSIM only works on a phone built with the hardware for it, and that is still a narrow band of premium Android models and iPhones from the last several years. For a market where feature phones and mid-range 2G/3G-era devices still make up a huge share of what people actually carry, “compatible device” is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence.
None of this means the technologies are wrong to pursue. 5G and eSIMs are where global telecom is heading, and Pakistan cannot simply opt out forever. The problem is sequencing.
Spectrum auctions, tax policy on imported components, and public messaging have all moved ahead of the one thing that actually determines whether ordinary people benefit: the device in their pocket.
Local assembly plants are still producing feature phones by the millions, because that is what the market can afford, while the regulator talks about mid-band coverage and NFC banking as if the average user is one software update away from using them.
This is a familiar pattern in Pakistani policymaking. A decision gets announced because the announcement itself is the achievement a auction completed, a policy notified, a “launch” held while the harder, slower work of making the technology actually reach people gets treated as a footnote. Fuel price reforms, digital ID rollouts, and now telecom upgrades have all followed a version of this script: bold on paper, uneven on the ground.
The fix is not to cancel 5G or shelve eSIMs. It is to be honest about timelines. Pair the network rollout with real tax relief on affordable 5G-capable handsets, as PTA itself has urged. Set eSIM policy in step with actual device penetration data, not aspirational percentages.
And stop measuring success by whether a launch event happened, and start measuring it by how many Pakistanis can actually use what was launched.
Until then, Pakistan will keep taking decisions it is not quite ready for and calling it progress.
