ISLAMABAD: Pakistan still lags behind other countries in the digitisation race because it lacks a collaborative telecom approach that is required to meet the increasing demand for data.

This was stated by the strategy director of Edotco Group, Gayan Koralage, while talking to journalists here on Saturday.

He said the four telecom operators in the country had around 34,000 towers. However, with the advent of 4G and 5G, the tower requirement would increase manifold by 2022 and 17,000 more towers would be needed to accommodate the users.

He said that around 40 per cent of the 35,000 towers were just 300 metres apart, which resulted in wastage of around $1bn worth of capital for the industry as the towers could be shared by the companies.

He said that currently the rate of mobile phone penetration in Pakistan was around 74pc, which meant more than half the population.

“Data consumption is forecast to increase by as much as seven times between 2018 and 2022, so tower requirements will increase too. The need of the hour is to adopt a more collaborative approach by all telecom companies to be successful in the 5G era,” he said.

With future investment plan of $100 million, the Malaysia-based Edotco Group offered telecom operators to provide shared network of mobile towers for better services to the customers in Pakistan, he said.

European countries were following the model of shared network of mobile operators to provide better services to the consumers. It would also result in saving of multi-billion dollars that were being spent on installing parallel towers by different companies.

Mr Koralage said that the company had already invested $200 million to set up mobile towers.

“To shift from 3G to 4G, there needed to be an increase in the number of sites. If each operator has their own site and tower then it will result in overcrowding of towers and therefore telcos have to adopt modern concepts being introduced by tower companies,” he said.

To fulfil the Digital Pakistan agenda of the government and meet the growing demand for data transfer, tower sharing will become essential as it is followed by other advanced countries, he added.

The Edotco official added that Pakistan still lagged behind in the digitisation race as other countries have made robust progress in the last five years. In 2018, the 4G penetration rate in Malaysia was 55pc whereas the 4G population coverage has not even crossed 50pc in Pakistan in 2019.

Published in Dawn, November 3rd, 2019