9,200 Theft Incidents, 16 Percent of Towers Hit: PTA Report Exposes Pakistan’s Telecom Infrastructure Crisis

Pakistan’s mobile network is being stolen. Not metaphorically, physically. Diesel drained from generators. Equipment stripped from towers. Infrastructure that took years and billions of rupees to build, damaged or destroyed by organised telecom tower theft and vandalism at a rate the country’s telecom regulator has now formally quantified before parliament.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has submitted its written report to the Sub-Committee of the Senate Standing Committee on IT and Telecommunications, presenting a comprehensive account of the crisis facing Pakistan’s telecom infrastructure and laying out what it intends to do about it.

The numbers are worse than most people outside the industry realised.

9,200 Incidents in 11 Months, Province by Province

Over the past 11 months, Pakistan recorded more than 9,200 incidents of theft and vandalism targeting telecom infrastructure. These attacks collectively affected approximately 16 percent of the country’s total cellular infrastructure, meaning roughly one in six mobile sites across Pakistan has been hit.

The provincial breakdown reveals where the crisis is most severe. Sindh recorded the highest number of incidents, 3,938 cases across 31 districts, making it the worst-affected province by a significant margin. Punjab follows with 2,827 incidents across 38 districts. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa recorded 1,668 incidents across 25 districts, while Balochistan, despite its vast geography and sparse population saw 716 incidents across 26 districts.

The geographic spread of the data is as telling as the total. These are not isolated incidents clustered in a handful of troubled areas. They are distributed across 120-plus districts spanning all four provinces, a pattern that points to systemic vulnerability in how Pakistan’s telecom infrastructure is secured, rather than localised crime in specific regions.

PTA has directed all mobile operators to implement effective measures to stop diesel theft at telecom towers and has ordered companies to establish comprehensive security systems for fuel at tower sites. Operators have also been instructed to install security cameras and ensure physical security standards are met, obligations that, as the 9,200-incident figure demonstrates, have not been adequately enforced across the network.

Load Shedding: The Second Front

Beyond theft, PTA’s report identifies load shedding as a major challenge for the continuity of mobile and internet services. The two problems are directly connected: when power cuts force towers onto diesel generators, that diesel becomes the most valuable and most vulnerable asset at each site and the primary target for theft.

The IT Ministry, acting on the PTA’s request, has raised the issue of priority electricity supply for telecom infrastructure with power distribution companies. PTA is in active contact with NEPRA and the Power Division regarding express feeders and smart transformers for telecom infrastructure, solutions that would reduce or eliminate the diesel dependency that creates the theft vulnerability in the first place.

The express feeder approach, dedicating specific power lines to critical infrastructure, including telecom towers, has been used in other markets to insulate connectivity infrastructure from general load shedding schedules. Smart transformers offer a more sophisticated solution, enabling remote monitoring and management of power supply to individual sites. Neither solution is immediate, but both are on PTA’s stated agenda.

The Speed Reality and the Targets

The theft and power crisis are unfolding against a backdrop of Pakistan’s most significant spectrum expansion in its telecom history. PTA’s report states that the 200-plus percent increase in spectrum, driven by the 5G auction completed in March 2026, is expected to deliver a significant improvement in service quality.

The starting point makes the ambition clear. Pakistan’s average 4G speed currently sits at approximately 4 Mbps, a figure that places the country well below regional peers and far below what modern mobile broadband should deliver. PTA has set a target of raising average 4G speeds to approximately 20 Mbps, a fivefold improvement that would meaningfully change the mobile internet experience for Pakistan’s 161 million broadband subscribers.

On 5G, PTA’s initial phase target is 50 Mbps, a speed that would represent a genuine step change in mobile connectivity for users in covered areas and would enable use cases that 4G networks at current speeds simply cannot support.

These are targets, not guarantees. Achieving them depends not just on spectrum availability but on network infrastructure investment, backhaul capacity, and the elimination, or at least significant reduction, of the theft and power disruption that currently degrades the networks that spectrum is supposed to enhance.

Infrastructure Investment: Sites, Fiber, and Technology Transitions

PTA’s report outlines the infrastructure commitments that are supposed to support its speed targets. Mobile operators will install 1,000 new sites annually, with 20 percent of new installations placed in locations that have not previously had coverage, extending the network’s geographic reach rather than simply densifying existing coverage areas.

Over the past five years, more than 12,000 mobile sites have been installed or upgraded across the country, a substantial investment that the theft crisis is actively undermining by damaging and disabling infrastructure that operators have spent significant capital to deploy.

On technology, operators have introduced VoLTE, VoWiFi, and Massive MIMO technology alongside the phased retirement of 3G. These transitions reflect the network modernisation that underpins the speed improvement targets, Massive MIMO in particular, enables significant capacity gains on existing spectrum by using multiple antenna arrays to serve more users simultaneously.

The fiber-to-site ratio, the proportion of mobile towers connected to fiber backhaul rather than microwave or copper, is targeted to rise from the current 20 percent to 35 percent. Fiber backhaul is essential for delivering the capacity that 5G speeds require, and the current 20 percent figure is a significant bottleneck for network performance even where 5G spectrum is available.

PTA is also exploring the introduction of national roaming on highways, a feature that would allow users to automatically connect to whichever operator has the strongest signal on major road networks, improving connectivity for travellers and reducing the dead zones that currently exist on routes where individual operator coverage is patchy.

Monitoring Gets Granular

PTA has announced that network downtime monitoring has been extended to union council, tehsil, district, and national levels following the 5G rollout, a significant expansion of the regulator’s visibility into where and when network failures occur.

Operators are now required to comply with specified network downtime limits at every level of this monitoring hierarchy. Service quality is being tracked through OpenSignal analytics and quarterly KPI reviews, independent, data-driven assessments of how networks are actually performing for users rather than what operators self-report.

The Right of Way charges exemption for telecom infrastructure is also under active consideration — a policy that, if implemented, would remove one of the most frequently cited barriers to new site deployment and network expansion.

Pakistan Relevance: What This Means for 200 Million Users

For Pakistan’s more than 200 million mobile subscribers, PTA’s report translates into a simple question: when does the experience improve?

The honest answer is that it depends on two things happening simultaneously: the infrastructure attacks must be brought under control, and the spectrum investment must translate into actual network capacity. Neither is guaranteed by a report alone.

What PTA’s Senate submission does is put the full scale of the problem and the plan to address it, on formal record. The 9,200-incident figure is now parliamentary testimony. The speed targets are now regulatory commitments. The express feeder and smart transformer discussions are now documented policy positions rather than informal conversations.

That accountability matters. Pakistan’s mobile internet users have experienced deteriorating service quality in many areas even as subscriber numbers have grown. The gap between the connectivity Pakistan’s digital economy needs and the connectivity its infrastructure currently delivers is real and documented. The PTA’s report acknowledges that gap explicitly and sets timelines for closing it.

The Bottom Line

Pakistan’s telecom infrastructure is under sustained physical attack, simultaneously underpowered by an unreliable grid, and still expected to deliver 5G speeds of 50 Mbps and 4G speeds of 20 Mbps on a network where the current average is 4 Mbps. That gap between reality and ambition is large, but it is not unbridgeable. The spectrum is now in place. The targets are now set. The monitoring framework is now in place. What remains is enforcement of security obligations, resolution of the power supply problem, and delivery of the infrastructure investment that the speed targets require. The PTA’s Senate report is the clearest picture yet of what Pakistan’s telecom network actually looks like beneath the headline subscriber figures and what it will take to make it work as the country’s digital economy depends on it doing so.