New Delhi, April 6 (IANS). The launch of 5G services in some parts of Pakistan is a big step, but due to the country’s economic and infrastructure challenges, this technology currently seems to be mostly a marketing story, not a real working reality.
Daily Mirror reports that the physical network required for 5G signals in Pakistan is very weak, especially the network that connects mobile towers to the main network.
Fiber-optic cable is considered the best in the world. It can carry terabits of data in seconds and its latency is fractions of milliseconds. For 5G standalone networks, backhaul speeds of more than ten Gbps and round-trip times of less than five milliseconds are required at each site.
Only 15 percent of mobile towers in Pakistan are connected by fiber and the remaining 85 percent rely on microwave radio links, which have limited capacity, become weak in bad weather and cannot handle 5G traffic.
The spectrum auction was held in Islamabad in March this year, in which 480 MHz spectrum was sold for $507 million and the spectrum in use increased almost three times. According to the report, this is just the first step and it is a long and difficult road ahead.
Connecting a site with fiber costs approximately $10,000 to $20,000. There are thousands of sites across the country that need to be upgraded, but such an expense would be much larger than the half a billion dollars recently raised.
There is also the problem of Pakistan’s right-of-way fees. Every year one has to pay PKR 35 to 60 per meter, whereas in India the fee has to be paid only once. This means that a one-time expense becomes an expense every year, which discourages investors.
For this reason, Pakistan is ranked 76th out of 93 countries in the GSMA Fiber Development Index. The report warned that without improvements, fiberization will remain the biggest weakness of the country’s 5G rollout.
Moreover, the demand for 5G is also low in Pakistan. Only one percent of mobile handsets in the country support 5G. Nearly 90 percent of locally made phones are still limited to only 2G or 3G.
–IANS
AY/ABM