KARACHI: Following the Biometric Verification System (BVS) drive, cellular companies have lost 25.375 million subscribers, as Pakistan’s cellular teledensity retreated by 16% in Fiscal Year 2014-15 (FY15).
As per latest stats made available by Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), Pakistan telecom sector witnessed huge blow in FY15 as government’s measures to curb terrorism brought unwanted results for them pushing national cellular subscribers’ base down enormously from 139.98 million users’ base of FY14 to 114.75 million users at the end of June 2015. As a result, the Cellular Teledensity in Pakistan by the end of FY15 has reached to level of 60.7%, showing 16% percent decline as against 76.46% Teledensity at the end of June 2014.
The Teledensity is defined as the number of customers per 100 people.
Peshawar school attack led the Government to verify all the un-registered and un-verified SIMs for security reasons. The cellular companies of the country had successfully completed the Biometric Verification of SIMs within the deadline that was provided by the interior ministry. Starting January 12th, 2015, the biometric re-verification drive continued for 90 days during which more than 80,000 biometric re-verification devices (each of which costs from 350$ to 400$) were installed by cellular companies with almost $60 million spent by cellular companies on the drive.
It is to be noted that as many as thousands of unverified SIMs are still working across the country, however official figures show that the all major five operators have suspended around 26 million bogus connections during this drive or the companies managed to verify 114 millions connections while blocked SIMs are still getting verified by the users. Meanwhile, companies must have issued new connections during and after the drive, so it can be said that the figures provided by PTA don’t prove that the difference between the subscribers base in FY15 and FY14 were the accurate numbers of connections that were blocked by the companies as they may have blocked more than 25 million SIMs because PTA didn’t provide the actual numbers of blocked SIMs.
Amongst the teleocm operators, market leader Mobilink lost 5.353 million connections in FY15 while the U-Fone happened to be the most affected company as it lost 6.643 million connections. Similarly, Telenor saw plunge by loosing 5.171 million users or connections and Zong also remained unable to retain its 5.184 million subscribers after the BVS drive. Last but not the least, Warid being a small player saw slump failing to keep its 3.354 million SIMs legal.
On the other hand , due to BVS verification, telecom operators couldn’t pay much concentration to newly launched new generation technologies in Pakistan last fiscal, however, the figures provided by the PTA don’t show much gloomy illustration as the total 3G subscribers in the country by the end of May 2015 reached to 13.134 million amongst total 114.75 million national subscribers’ base while the 4/G or LTE users stood at 141177 with the Warid leading the competition got 79213 users as Zong
being the only second provider of 4G services in the country unable to obtain much attention of its subscribers as it 4G users stood at 61964 users at the end of May 2015.
