Pakistan’s Internet Crisis in 2025: Among the Slowest and Most Expensive in the Region

In Pakistan today, a common frustration ripples across cities and rural towns alike: sluggish internet, frequent disruptions, and a constant fight with latency. For many users, streaming buffers, video calls drop, large file uploads crawl, and the dream of a seamless digital life feels distant. Freelancers scrambling to meet deadlines abroad complain of hours lost; university students attempting remote classes endure grinding waits; small businesses struggle to maintain cloud links. The everyday reality is that Pakistan’s internet is increasingly seen as unreliable infrastructure.

Just months ago, undersea cable damage off Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, knocked out vital links on the SMW4 and IMEWE systems, dimming bandwidth nationwide and overcrowding the remaining routes. The fallout was especially harsh in evening peak hours, when traffic demand surges and bottlenecks form.

PTCL, Pakistan’s largest backbone provider, confirmed that the fault impacted international routes and caused congestion on secondary paths, slowing down both uploads and downloads.

As users complain, telecom sectors and service providers scramble to patch capacity, but the remedies are temporary and overburdened. The deeper challenge is structural: Pakistan’s network lacks resilience, and regulatory policies often aggravate bottlenecks. In 2025, the country’s internet condition will have become not just a technical issue but a test of development, equity, economic competitiveness, and trust in institutions.

Global Internet Costs by Country in 2025

To understand how Pakistan fares globally, one must look at the cost of connectivity. In 2025, a comparative study of fixed broadband pricing across more than 60 countries revealed stark disparities in what users pay per megabit per second (Mbps). Below is the relevant segment of that ranking:

It’s an alarming situation for Pakistan, which ranks 10th globally in internet cost at $0.53 per Mbps, yet continues to deliver some of the poorest speeds in the region. With an average mobile download speed of just 24.32 Mbps and fixed broadband crawling at 16 Mbps, users are paying premium rates for a service that barely meets basic digital standards. This imbalance highlights a deep-rooted problem: consumers and businesses in Pakistan are spending far more than they should for internet speeds that lag behind even regional averages.

Now, if we hypothetically assume Pakistan improved its infrastructure and regulatory efficiency enough to reach 20th position globally, the cost per Mbps would likely drop to around $0.15–$0.18, based on averages from similarly ranked countries like Turkey, Malaysia, and Thailand.

With that improvement, Pakistan’s average mobile speed could potentially rise to 80–100 Mbps, while fixed broadband speeds could jump to 120–150 Mbps, putting it closer to regional competitors such as India and Malaysia.

The Stakes: Pakistan’s Speed, Rankings, and Economic Cost

According to documents obtained earlier^[1], Pakistan is ranked 98th in the world for mobile internet, with an average download speed of merely 24.32 Mbps. On the fixed broadband side, the country sits at 144th, averaging only 16 Mbps. These numbers stand in stark contrast to global norms: average mobile speeds globally hover around 60 Mbps, while fixed broadband averages 100 Mbps.

Comparative Internet Speed Snapshots:

India

India ranks 27th globally for mobile internet, with an average download speed of around 131.77 Mbps. For fixed broadband, the country holds the 99th position, averaging nearly 59.07 Mbps.

Malaysia

Malaysia is ranked 21st in the world for mobile internet, with an average download speed of 143.56 Mbps. On the fixed broadband side, the country sits at 41st, averaging around 154.03 Mbps.

Bangladesh

Bangladesh ranks 92nd globally for mobile internet, with an average download speed of 36.84 Mbps. In fixed broadband, it holds the 98th position, averaging around 60.26 Mbps.

The above comparisons show the big gap. Pakistan’s digital economy, including its $3 billion+ IT exports, a large freelancer class, e-commerce ventures, and startup ecosystem, depends heavily on reliable, low-latency connectivity. A delay of even a few seconds per transaction, per user, over months and years, accumulates into millions of dollars in lost deals, tarnished reputations abroad, and inefficiencies in public services and education.

This isn’t a new story for 2025; Pakistan’s internet troubles have been brewing for years. Back in 2024, the country faced a major internet shutdown that disrupted millions of users nationwide and highlighted the fragility of its digital infrastructure.

According to reports^[2], Pakistan ranked among the worst-hit nations that year, with outages estimated to have caused disruptions worth $1.62 billion, accounting for 21% of global losses linked to intentional internet blocks. The impact was especially harsh on freelancers and small digital service firms

The Undersea Cable Crisis

One of the most acute pressure points is Pakistan’s dependence on submarine cables through the Red Sea corridor. In early September 2025, multiple cable cuts near Jeddah damaged both SMW4 and IMEWE, two of Pakistan’s vital international lifelines. The cuts disrupted bandwidth, increased latency, and forced ISPs to reroute traffic over inferior paths. Microsoft Azure users, for example, saw higher delays as traffic passed through slower alternate routes.

Such undersea incidents are not rare. Previous reports noted that 44 public submarine cable damages were noted in 2024–2025, often involving anchor drags, natural hazards, or low-level sabotage. Cable systems with limited redundancy, as is often the case in South Asia and Africa, are especially vulnerable to outage cascades.

Pakistan’s dependency on a few cables, especially through vulnerable routes, magnifies risk: if one link fails, the remaining paths often can’t absorb the extra load without serious congestion.

Earlier in 2025, Pakistan faced a fault in the AAE-1 cable near Qatar, which significantly reduced capacity. PTA responded by injecting ad hoc bandwidth to temporarily restore services. But these fixes are stopgaps, and the underlying architecture remains exposed.

Unlike more diversified networks in Europe or North America, Pakistan’s network lacks deep cross-routing and multiple submarine landings. Traffic that once passed smoothly through one cable must now “hop” over longer, costlier routes, increasing latency, packet loss, and jitter, especially under peak load.

Infrastructure Weaknesses & Technical Vulnerabilities

At the heart of Pakistan’s connectivity crisis lies a fragile and overstressed network. Years of underinvestment, fragile infrastructure, and recurring shutdowns have made the internet ecosystem one of the least resilient in the region. Several systemic weaknesses continue to drive the instability:

• Single Point of Failure: All submarine cables enter through Karachi, making the city’s coastal landing points a critical choke zone. Any failure upstream can lead to nationwide disruptions.
• Limited Redundancy: Backup routes are underutilized or poorly provisioned. When data is rerouted, these links often become congested, worsening outages.
• Power Instability at Telecom Sites: PTA reports indicate that around 21,000 sites suffer routine power cuts, and 24,885 have weak or no generator backup. Some towers have been damaged or looted, while 147 sites were attacked over the past five years.
• Deficient Fiberization: Pakistan’s “insufficient fiberization” limits backhaul capacity, causing network congestion and slower speeds, especially during peak hours.
• BGP Rerouting Inefficiency: When cables fail, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) reroutes traffic inefficiently, leading to high latency, packet loss, and jitter, often seen by users as buffering or slow responses.
• Geopolitical Risk to Submarine Cables: Reports from Insikt Group highlight growing threats to undersea cables from anchor drags, ship collisions, and intentional interference, particularly in the Red Sea corridor that carries Pakistan’s data traffic.
• Government-Imposed Shutdowns: Internet blackouts during religious events, political protests, or national security alerts have become routine, disconnecting millions and severely impacting online business and communication.
• Slow Infrastructure Expansion: Despite the rapid growth in users, investment in fiber networks, 5G rollout, and data centers remains far behind regional peers.
• Poor Coordination Among Agencies: Delays between PTA, MOITT, and telecom operators often stall critical upgrades or emergency responses, prolonging outages that could otherwise be contained.

Together, these vulnerabilities make Pakistan’s digital backbone fragile. Whether from technical failure, power instability, or deliberate shutdowns, the network continues to lack the resilience needed to support a modern, connected economy.

Impact on Real Lives, Businesses, and the Economy

Behind data tables and policies lie real human costs. Pakistan’s burgeoning IT sector, its 2+ million freelancers, small digital firms, and students all take the hit when connectivity falters.

Freelancers & Exporters

For freelancers working on global platforms, upload delays, video call jitters, and synchronization failures translate directly into lost contracts and reputational damage. P@SHA estimates that these disruptions may cost the industry $150 million per year, with even a single hour-long outage imposing over $1 million in economic loss.

IT Companies & Startups

Cloud-based businesses, SaaS operators, and tech startups depend on stable, low-latency links to servers in the U.S., Europe, or Singapore. When latency spikes, response times degrade, customer experience suffers, and automated systems falter. Some clients may even leave, citing reliability concerns.

Public Services & Education

From government e-services to remote classrooms, unreliable internet undermines national development goals. Students attending online lectures see frozen video, teachers lose interaction, and exam systems become vulnerable. Rural parts of the country, already underserved, feel the pain hardest.

Macroeconomic Risks

The cumulative effect is a drag on growth. As Pakistan continues its digital ambitions, infrastructure hiccups and regulatory friction degrade investor confidence, discourage foreign tech firms, and slow digital exports. Internet outages already cost billions, as noted, and continuous degradation may scale those losses.

Pathways to Recovery: Policies, Investments, and Reform

Even in a constrained environment, Pakistan has paths forward, but they demand boldness, coordination, and investment.

Enhancing Redundancy & Subsea Diversity

Pakistan must urgently invest in multiple submarine cable landings, for example, routes via Oman, the Arabian Sea, or Iran, to reduce dependency on the Red Sea choke point. Encouraging regional cable consortia or public-private partnerships can help. Repair capacity must also be expanded so that cable faults are fixed faster.

Upgrading Domestic Backbone & Fiberization

Expanding fiber links across provinces and local aggregation nodes is critical. Bridging the digital divide demands that rural districts and smaller towns receive optical backhaul, not only urban centers.

Revisiting Surveillance Architecture

The government should reassess the architecture of traffic inspection and filtering systems like WMS 2.0. A redesign that separates content monitoring from real-time traffic paths, or offloads deep inspection to edge nodes, could reduce latency impacts. Transparency, audits, and limits on active filtering must accompany such systems to minimize negative economic externalities.

Stronger Regulatory Oversight & Penalties

PTA must shift from conduct-based auditing to outcome-based enforcement. If operators fail to meet speed or latency thresholds, stricter penalties should follow. Regulatory forbearance should yield to accountability. Consumer protection frameworks should empower citizens to report poor service for binding redress.

Incentivizing Private Investment

Tax incentives, grants, or matching funds can attract private players to invest in ISP infrastructure, fiber networks, and edge caches. PTA should coordinate to ease licensing, right-of-way, and foreign participation barriers.

Pakistan’s internet crisis in 2025 is not a technical detail; it is a living challenge to the country’s digital future. The structural fractures exposed by cable cuts, surveillance-induced bottlenecks, weak oversight, and fragile infrastructure are not insurmountable, but they demand urgency.

The nation still attracts software exports, hosts millions of digital freelancers, and aims for a connected education and e-government future. But the path forward requires honest assessment and bold policy shifts.