Why cheap data and a small mindset keep Pakistan offline

A military childhood, nine schools, and an accidental engineer

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation he wants to have — internet as the gateway to development in the new knowledge economy, and a guest who has watched that gateway open and stall from the inside. Taimur Nawaz is the director of new business development and head of marketing at Transworld. Before any of that, the talk winds back to a childhood spent moving down the GT Road.

Taimur comes from a military family; his father served thirty-three years in the army, and the family moved between cantonments constantly. He counts nine schools before tenth grade — convent schools in Jhelum and Sialkot, an army government school, Saint Mary’s in Rawalpindi where his father had an eleven-year posting. He describes the environment in the same affectionate terms Muzamil recognises from his own upbringing: small, secluded, safe, full of swimming and squash and cycling.

He did engineering at NUST’s Military College of Signals, majoring in telecom, and graduated in 1999 — well before the telecom boom. The choice was not strategic. Maths was the subject that genuinely intrigued him, and in Pakistan, he says, career decisions are usually driven by economics rather than mentoring or developed interest. He almost went a different way entirely: he was a self-described “boring kid” who read general knowledge books, started writing young, and was fascinated by diplomats and foreign service. He thought hard about sitting the CSS exam and even joined an academy with a friend, but concluded he was not cut out for it. He is at peace with that. “I am better off, to be honest.”

The voice-to-data flip that defined a career

His first job was project management at Alcatel in Islamabad, with a month of training at Alcatel University in Lannion in 2000 — the early days of GSM. But project management is an enclosed-office world, and Taimur wanted the commercial side of telecom, where engineers move from network planning into strategy. He read an MBA as the way to stay in telecom and reach that side, and did his general management MBA at LUMS, class of 2003.

The timing was lucky. Licences came to Pakistan that February, the Warids and Telenors of the world arrived, and after a brief stint at Ufone he joined Telenor as employee number five on the founding team. Irfan Wahab, Telenor’s later CEO, was employee number one. He stayed eight and a half years, mostly running value-added services — ringback tones, IVR portals, messaging — back when SMS was king and OTT apps did not exist. Those portals made serious money, not pocket change, because there was simply nothing else.

He returns to a story from that first Alcatel interview that frames the whole career. The CEO, Saeed Mirza, asked the young engineer how the 95% voice, 5% data ratio of 1999 would change over the coming decades. Taimur guessed sixty-forty at best. Mirza told him it would flip entirely — 95% data, 5% voice. “You would actually see around, it’s actually getting in that direction now,” Taimur tells Muzamil. “Everything is enabled by data now.”

Why Pakistan keeps arriving late

By the time 3G and 4G reached the world in 2008 and 2009, Pakistan was years behind; it launched in 2013. Muzamil presses on why. Taimur breaks the lag into concrete factors rather than the usual hand-waving.

The first is device compatibility. A 4G network needs 4G devices in people’s hands, and this is a low-ARPU market — four or five dollars back then, against forty-plus in the Gulf — flooded with legacy 2G handsets even now. The second is ARPU itself, because ARPU drives CapEx. “Telcos tabhi lagayega when they actually see they can make money out of it,” he says; it is a commercial decision before anything else. The third is the regulator. Without naming him, Taimur credits one vibrant official at the helm of the spectrum body for finally getting a 4G auction policy in place after years of academic legwork that never converted into anything. “Hats off to him, to be honest.”

The same dilemma now blocks 5G. ARPU has slid under a dollar — around 87 cents after devaluation — and four telcos are too many for the market, with consolidation already underway. Muzamil’s view is that the regulator needs to redesign how it sells spectrum: you cannot extract a 150-to-200-million-dollar licence fee up front from a small market you are simultaneously trying to kick-start. He argues for a phased, hotspot approach — premium speed in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, where consumers will pay extra — rather than blanket national rollout. Taimur agrees the business case for full coverage does not exist, and adds that this time it is the telcos, not the regulator, driving the 5G conversation.

The cheapest data in the world has no reason to lay fibre

Here the conversation hits its central irony. Pakistan’s data is so cheap that nobody has any incentive to switch to Wi-Fi. Muzamil describes his own behaviour: when his home Wi-Fi acts up, he simply tethers to mobile data because it is easier and his Jazz package gives him 30-to-40 Mbps for a fraction of the cost of a fixed line. In the UAE, mobile data is expensive enough that a home connection is non-negotiable. In Pakistan the opposite is true — and that pricing reality, Taimur notes, quietly shapes how the whole country uses the internet.

Fixed broadband, his current world, behaves nothing like wireless. A single tower can light up a town on Monday morning; fibre means physically digging, laying NOCs, and pouring labour and CapEx into the ground. You cannot decide to energise a sector next month. Operators choose where to build using a metric called “house passes” — how many occupied homes sit in a stretch, what the household size and addressable market are. A hundred homes makes no sense; a thousand might. Fibre penetration in Pakistan is roughly 1%, concentrated in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad with pockets in Sialkot, Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Peshawar. Even in Islamabad, where Transworld has invested heavily across sectors, the company has not recouped its money despite decent penetration.

Muzamil sharpens the point with his own driver, who lives five kilometres from downtown Islamabad and has no fibre option at all — running everything off mobile data, with a cap on how much his kids can do online. “F sector and DHA market is not a market in Pakistan,” Muzamil says. “It’s not a representation of us.” The growth is in the segment that has no last-mile fibre, and the business is built for the top 10%. Taimur frames the buyer reality bluntly: even in Islamabad’s F-sectors, internet is a price-sensitive commodity, which is why fixed broadband sells as a triple-play bundle — internet, IPTV and voice for three to four thousand rupees — rather than on speed alone.

The turf wars that stopped a shared last mile

The two of them circle a question that should have an obvious answer: why does every operator dig its own trench? Muzamil recalls Nayatel digging up his lawn in 2003, and points out that a single duct could carry five thousand companies’ fibre. In Dubai, a single bill at home covers fixed and mobile broadband; one shared infrastructure could even dissolve Pakistan’s prepaid-postpaid headache. Why has nobody built a portable, shared last-mile — the way US homes have one line and multiple providers behind it, or the way mobile number portability already works?

Taimur’s answer is plain: turf wars. Operators each had a head start in a different city, Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad are three fragmented markets with different incumbents, and everyone plays inside their own territory. Tower sharing never reached its potential either, even after Engro entered the space. The furthest collaboration has gone is a common-corridor project in Karachi — a shared duct where each provider runs its own fibre, pooling the cost of digging once. He agrees the logical endpoint is a port-style model, and expects some company to eventually build it, following global best practice. The country is just not there yet.

He demystifies the rest of the economics on the way through. Bandwidth supply is not the bottleneck — it is a duopoly of two submarine cable operators, PTCL and Transworld, and the constraint is pricing, not capacity, with consortium cables that can scale up. A separate, CPEC-linked submarine system is still in the pipeline at an advanced stage and would add a third source, pushing prices down. And the free installations Muzamil remembers are deliberate subsidy: operators eat the cost of the ONT and set-top box and recover it over a 24-month installment plan, betting on the high loyalty of a customer who, once wired in, rarely switches.

Why telcos and fintechs failed at being tech companies

Muzamil moves to a pattern he has watched globally — telcos insisting they are now “data companies” or “tech companies,” vertically integrating into apps, IPTV, agritech and streaming, and mostly failing. Jazz had genuine success in fintech with JazzCash, but the broader bets retired. He asks why.

Taimur’s diagnosis is talent and mindset. Telcos could never attract specialised people, because an agritech or DevOps or ML engineer lives in their own hardcore domain and does not come to a telco. The people who did join treated the corporate as a place to learn at the company’s expense before leaving — and many did exactly that, spending three or four years before starting their own ventures. Telcos became unintentional incubators: they triggered the market, handed out platforms and wallets, then exited, leaving the talent to build elsewhere.

The same gap shows up in fintech, where Muzamil says you cannot lift a stone without finding a wallet underneath. The elevator pitch is always the same — huge young population, massive addressable market, financial inclusion — but the real money is not in wallets, where cash-in from conventional banking is mostly free; it is in lending, which collapses without credit scoring. He recounts how Qista arrived with fanfare around buy-now-pay-later and, by market account, drowned in fraud and defaults, because Pakistan has no basic credit scoring and no interoperable data following a person between platforms. The genuinely useful fintech, he argues, would be a super-app layer that unifies data against a CNIC or phone number and produces an encrypted credit profile the whole industry could use. Taimur’s read is harsher: he sees no glorified mission in any of them. The one true moment of penetration he has witnessed was a single hawker in Islamabad displaying a JazzCash QR code — convenience reaching the bottom of the market on its own.

The 52-year-old advisor and the mindset ceiling

The mindset thread runs through everything, and Taimur tells two stories to make it concrete. A logistics company he dealt with at Qualcomm sent an advisor who proudly said he had been there fifty-two years — having started as an intern and been rehired in advisory capacity, in a firm where the average employee tenure exceeds twenty years. Taimur was left speechless. How do you expect a company to build products for the youth when the people building them cannot relate to the youth? He sees the same disconnect across the sector — companies that present a young, tech-savvy market while staffing it with people who cannot imagine it.

He extends this to local manufacturing. The DIRBS device registration system he helped bring to Pakistan from Qualcomm’s San Diego team did real good — capturing tax, creating price parity, and enabling a wave of SKD-based local assembly under the MDM policy, with twenty-five or twenty-six licences issued. But because it was SKD rather than true manufacturing, the last two years of LC and import problems have started shutting plants. He knows one businessman who made 50,000 devices a month here, then moved to a joint venture in South Africa and a UAE distribution hub because the Pakistani case stopped being viable. He remains a believer in the policy, expecting CKD-based assembly to settle in eventually, because the country still has enormous migration ahead — millions of 2G users who need an affordable path to smartphones.

What the future actually looks like

For his closing question, Muzamil bans the usual answer. No mentioning the youth population, no “if we do this, then that will happen” — just extrapolate from what already exists. Taimur steps outside telecom entirely and talks about Sialkot and Faisalabad.

He visited Forward Sports, which makes around 750,000 footballs a month and supplies the Adidas balls used in FIFA tournaments — the Telstar, the Brazuca — holding roughly 90% of Adidas’s global football share. The owner told him something that overturned conventional wisdom: he deliberately operates in a niche rather than chasing economies of scale, because scale means competing with China and India, and in the niche nobody can beat him. His process is so granular that he can unplug two workers from a line of a hundred and replace them within an hour. And yet, Taimur says, the company’s website was the most pathetic he had ever seen — a world-class operation that has no idea how to showcase itself to the world. He tells the same story about Interloop, the world’s largest sock manufacturer with around 8% global hosiery share and number one in the world; about Q Mobile, which he urged to attack the hundred-dollar Walmart shelf and never did; and about a Sialkot dental-instruments maker who owns a 20% stake in his own German competitor in Cologne.

The pattern is identical: extraordinary product, true potential never realised, capped by a “gali-mohalla seth” mindset that prefers being the seth of a street or a village to playing globally. The glass ceiling is self-inflicted. Muzamil connects it back to the Dawood family’s history — a top-21 business house that lost 70% of its assets in Bangladesh and another tranche to nationalisation, then rebuilt into Engro and Dawood Hercules — and to the Lucky Group, which he sees doing it right, assembling in Pakistan and exporting into the Middle East and African markets, even building apartment towers in Dubai.

Taimur ends on the one group he is betting on: the younger generation in those Sialkot and Faisalabad business families, many UK-educated, returning with the financial muscle, the acumen and the global outlook their fathers lacked. The strongest brand Pakistan exports today, he and Muzamil agree, is not a product at all — it is Coke Studio, pure brand recall. The argument of the episode is that the tangibles are already there. The ceiling is in the head.