ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has conducted a nationwide mobile Quality of Service (QoS) benchmarking test in different cities, towns and roads throughout Pakistan to assess the quality and performance of Pakistan’s mobile networks in line with the latest Network Performance Score (NPS) methodology.

A total of 10 cities, four towns and 18 motorways, highways, roads were surveyed in February and March and around 2,600 voice calls and 26,000 data tests were performed, while testing the networks with devices operating in 4G mode, said a news release.

The QoS test covered an area, including cities, towns and roads of approximately 3,570 kilometres.

NPS is a harmonised and integrative scoring methodology. It enables telecom regulators to compare and assess the quality of all mobile networks based on international standard KPIs. Using this systematic mobile network benchmarking methodology, PTA has gained valuable insights about the performance of each mobile network operator.

By making this survey public, PTA is spurring competition among operators to improve their existing infrastructure with an ultimate aim to increase the overall country-wide mobile network quality.

Bringing Pakistan’s LTE networks at par with the internationally adopted standards will lay the foundations for a future rollout of 5G technology on a sound footing.

The PTA also conducts nationwide mobile QoS surveys on periodic basis in order to assess the network performance of all Cellular Mobile Operators (CMOs) with respect to the licensed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for voice, data and SMS services.

The results are available on PTA’s website for awareness of the public, subscribers besides taking the same with concerned operator(s) for required actions to improve services wherever required.

Published in Dawn, June 29th, 2021