Story of Ufone Downfall – The Operator Announced Weakest Internet Provider as per PTA Survey

Ufone is a PTCL’s subsidiary and entered Pakistani cellular market as second mobile operator. It started its business in year 2001. The company after few years was sold out to UAE based telecommunication company Etisalat in 2006 by doing 26% management takeover .  The company launched its 3G and 4G services in Pakistan for both prepaid and postpaid customers in 2014. Other than that it has provided many valuable services for their customers. As the motto “It’s all about U” shows that the company aims to facilitate their customers at the best level.

Story of Ufone Downfall – The Operator Announced Weakest Internet Provider as Per PTA Survey

No doubt that the company has remained the best operator for many years. But in the recent survey conducted by Pakistan telecommunication Authority (PTA) many grey areas were highlighted in which Ufone was lagging behind. The aim of PTA to conduct this survey in major cities including Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Peshawar was to evaluate whether the mobile operators are providing services as per Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or not.

After the complete evaluation, Ufone came out as the weakest network in providing different cellular services. On the other hand, Zong became the top telecom network by PTA among all the mobile companies.

Starting from the user data “throughput”, Ufone ranked the last with 1.17MB/Sec. In “signal strength”, the operator again scored the last position with -72.03dBm. The “call completion” was also very low than the required standard with 95.63%. The performance of Ufone in KPIs like End to End Speech Quality, End to End SMS Delivery Time and SMS success rate was satisfactory. Interestingly, the PTA survey also disclosed that the call connection time of all the mobile operators is below satisfactory.

Zong surpassing Ufone that was number 4 operator not a long time back in all areas is surely an alarming situation. It seems like the network must bring some innovative changes to catch up with the rest. The decreasing 3G subscribers of Ufone 4 million (source: PTA) also indicates that the operator is losing subscriber base; which ultimately shows that they need to provide better quality services for their users to make the life easier and communication better. Making humorous and catchy advertisements are surely not the only criteria for Ufone to maintain top position in the telecom market. Therefore, Ufone really needs to take PTA survey serious in order to regain its lost position in the market.