Pakistan saw its 3G connections surge past 10 million in February, with an additional 1.2 million end users adopting the technology that month across the four main operators.
However, the announcement of this milestone is tempered by the revelation from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority that 3G growth in February was 14%.
This significant drop from the previous month’s 58% growth was attributed to a campaign encouraging biometric SIM verification. The campaign has also prevented operators from selling SIMs through retail outlets, leading to fewer new connections.
In addition, since the campaign began over 8 million SIMs have been blocked, and with only 200,000 new connections in February the overall number has remained essentially static at around 136.6 million since January.
In terms of 3G connections, Telenor Pakistan comes out ahead with 3.14 million, while Mobilink has 2.6 million, Ufone 2.4 million and Zong – a unit of China Mobile – has 2.1 million.
