Can 5G save Pakistan's economy?

OPPO, Pasha, and Pro Pakistani walk into a panel

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation as a follow-up to an earlier discussion with Jazz CEO Aamir Ibrahim about 5G’s prospects in Pakistan. Rather than a one-on-one, he has assembled a three-person panel: Yang Gu, brand director of OPPO South Asia; Kashif Junaidi, chairman of Pasha (Pakistan Software Houses Association); and Akram Ali, head of business development at Pro Pakistani. The combination is deliberate — a device manufacturer, a software-industry body, and a publication that has covered every major telecom launch in the country since 3G.

The setup matters because 5G is not a single question. It is simultaneously a hardware question, a policy question, a licensing question, and an economic question. Each guest holds a different piece of the puzzle.

From MP3 players to foldable phones: OPPO’s arc

Muzamil opens with Yang Gu, asking about OPPO’s origins and its path to Pakistan. Yang explains that OPPO was founded in China in 2004 — not as a smartphone company but as an audio and consumer electronics business. “Actually, we have a long history of researching into audio,” Yang says. “Our Blu-Ray player actually was one of the top in the European market.” The company entered Pakistan in 2014, a decade after its founding, and earlier than it entered most European markets.

The first product to gain traction was the F Series, marketed as a selfie-focused device. Yang’s explanation for why it worked is straightforward: “Our strengths somehow match the market because people here like taking photos, they like taking selfies, they are pretty much fond of partying and connecting with each other.” From there, OPPO expanded into the Reno series and, more recently, into foldable phones and augmented reality glasses.

The AR glasses segment is the most forward-looking part of Yang’s contribution. The device — lightweight, modular, attachable to ordinary frames — can display real-time translation, navigation, and health data from a connected smartphone. The translation feature, Yang explains, requires two pairs of glasses and a smartphone connection, but the direction of travel is clear: wearable, always-on, low-latency connectivity. “When we look at each other, we can see the translation real time directly on the mini screen,” Yang says. The implication for 5G is immediate — these use cases do not work on slower, higher-latency networks.

Pakistan’s software industry is growing in two directions at once

Kashif Junaidi, speaking partly in English and partly in Urdu to reach a broader audience, maps the software sector’s current trajectory. He describes two parallel growth tracks: local digital transformation, where IT companies are helping non-tech sectors like agriculture, fisheries, and textiles modernise; and pure software exports, where Pakistani companies are selling products and services globally. Both, he says, accelerated sharply during COVID, when digital wants became digital needs.

His argument for why 5G matters to the industry is not primarily about consumer speed. It is about latency and device density. “The more important thing is the latency part,” he says. “That’s where 5G really grows big — it will have near real-time connectivity.” He also points to the current network’s inability to handle large volumes of simultaneous device connections, a constraint that matters enormously for IoT deployments in agriculture and manufacturing.

Crucially, Kashif frames the developer community’s need for 5G as preceding the consumer’s need. Developers must be ahead of the market. They need to build, test, and productise on the new infrastructure before end users know they want what it enables.

Where the government and the telcos actually stand

Akram Ali provides the most grounded account of the current state of play. On the government side, he says the framework is largely in place — a consultant needs to be hired and a minimum bid price set. The original target was a licensing auction in March 2023, delayed by political instability, with a revised estimate of Q3 of that year. On the telco side, the picture is more complicated.

“For the global 5G rollout, you need to have 70% of 4G users,” Akram explains. “In Pakistan, we have 42%.” That gap alone signals how much foundational work remains. Beyond adoption rates, the infrastructure investment required is substantial: 5G cells have a shorter range than 4G towers, meaning the network mesh must be far denser and therefore far more expensive to build. With spectrum licences priced in dollars and the rupee under pressure, telcos are understandably cautious about committing capital.

Akram also describes attending a controlled 5G speed test conducted by Zong in Pakistan — roughly two years before this conversation — which he witnessed firsthand. It was a proof of concept in a controlled environment, not a commercial rollout, but it demonstrated that the technical capability exists domestically.

The $60 billion number and why it changes the conversation

The most striking data point in the episode comes from Kashif. He describes a study Pasha conducted with Google — titled Unlocking Pakistan’s Digital Potential — involving professional economists and statisticians based in Singapore, and launched with the President of Pakistan. The finding: if Pakistan deploys edge technologies — AI, machine learning, IoT — in its traditional sectors, it could generate a new economy worth $60 billion annually. “It’s an annual new economy of 60 billion — 20% of your total GDP every year,” Kashif says.

That number reframes the entire licensing-cost debate. The upfront cost of a 5G spectrum auction looks very different when set against a potential $60 billion annual uplift. Kashif’s argument is that the government is treating 5G as a revenue line — a licensing fee to collect — when it should be treating it as infrastructure to subsidise, the way roads or power grids are subsidised, because the downstream economic return dwarfs the upfront cost.

Muzamil pushes on this directly, drawing an analogy to cloud computing’s shift from large upfront enterprise contracts to pay-as-you-grow models. The companies that resisted that shift lost. The ones that embraced it ended up making more money over time, not less.

Use cases that are already real, not hypothetical

Akram’s account of a technology conference he attended in China is one of the more vivid passages in the conversation. He describes a 5G-enabled broadcast backpack that replaces an entire satellite news-gathering van. He describes robotic arms sorting waste autonomously for twenty-four hours, differentiating between cans and paper. He describes drone cameras identifying faults at electrical grid stations — dangerous work that previously required human engineers to climb poles. And he describes a surgeon performing an operation remotely, from his own home, through robotic arms connected over a 5G network.

“In Pakistan this is a big issue — you need to call the surgeon,” Akram says. “We are blessed, we live in Islamabad, Karachi. When my father had a heart attack, the surgeon was there in ten minutes. But in remote and rural areas, this is a big problem.” Roughly 40% of Pakistan’s population lives in rural areas. Telemedicine at the level of remote surgery is not a luxury feature in that context — it is a basic healthcare delivery mechanism.

Muzamil adds a use case from an earlier episode with an agri-tech company: satellite and drone-based real-time soil and crop monitoring. The limiting factor, he notes, is data transmission. High-resolution image data from autonomous drones cannot be transferred reliably on 4G. “You need 5G for that. You need that real-time analytics happening.”

The sandbox model and the freemium rollout

The most actionable policy proposal in the conversation comes from Kashif, and Muzamil develops it further. Rather than waiting for a full national rollout — which requires resolving the licensing cost, the infrastructure investment, and the 4G penetration gap simultaneously — the panel proposes a staged approach.

First, create special technology zones where 5G is available to businesses for R&D and productisation. This allows the software industry to build on the new infrastructure before consumers need it. Second, create consumer experience zones in high-footfall urban areas — Muzamil suggests Blue Area in Islamabad or Mall Road — where operators are given free or subsidised licences to let users and businesses experience 5G firsthand. “Once they will experience it, it’s a freemium model,” Kashif says. “Once you’ll see that everything is kind of centred around those areas, then you can start scaling it up.”

The underlying logic is that demand for 5G will not materialise spontaneously. It has to be demonstrated. The same was true of 4G. Nobody asked for it until they had it, and then they could not imagine life without it.

Pakistan in 2050: the closing question

Muzamil closes by asking each guest to imagine Pakistan in 2050 with a successful 5G rollout. Yang expresses hope that Pakistan will be producing original technology — “a lot of new scenes originally from Pakistan and not from other parts of the world.” Akram’s answer is personal: he travels frequently to Gilgit-Hunza and loses connectivity; he wants his children to be able to go anywhere in Pakistan without that anxiety.

Kashif’s answer is the most pointed. He cites Singapore — half the land area of Pakistan, half the population of Lahore, five million people — and notes that Singapore exports over $370 billion a year. Pakistan exports roughly $24 to $26 billion. “Just imagine how far behind in terms of per capita productivity we are,” he says. His vision for 2050 is a Pakistan that is not exporting raw cotton or raw talent, but value-added goods and services — doctors who stay in Pakistan and serve the world remotely, developers who work from home and earn in dollars, farmers whose yields match global averages because their soil sensors are connected to the network.

By the end of the conversation, the panel has moved well past the question in the title. The real question is not whether 5G can transform Pakistan’s economy. The research says it can, by $60 billion a year. The real question is whether the government will treat that number as a reason to move faster, or whether the licensing fee will remain the ceiling of the conversation.