Filling in the connectivity puzzle

For all the progress Pakistan has made in expanding internet access, the coverage is still anything but reliable. Forget the mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan or the Thar desert; just try driving to the outskirts of a metropolis and see signal bars disappear on your phone. Ask any operator about it and they would, justifiably so, start a monologue about the underlying reasons. But with satellite, the whole connectivity landscape can change as billionaires (or trillionaires?) pour their money into expanding the technology.

To understand whether they can truly scale, let’s first get a sense of how connected Pakistan is currently. By the end of FY26, the country had roughly 164 million broadband connections, of which an overwhelming majority — 159.5m — were via mobile data. Fixed makes up just 4.4m, roughly a tenth of all households. Within this smaller base, all focus lately has naturally been towards fibre, which has grown from around 100,000 connections in FY19 to 2.88m by June. While the rate of uptake is impressive, the sheer scale is still quite sobering, as under 8pc of households are fiberised.

The problem is economics: laying fibre to a single home runs somewhere between Rs60,000 and Rs120,000, with most of the core inputs — the cable, optical network terminals, splitters — almost entirely imported, then hit with tariffs of around 70 per cent on top. The customer, though, pays only a small fraction, some Rs10,000-15,000 upfront. The internet service provider (ISP) must bear this capex, extending the payback period to eight or 10 years.

The math only works where incomes and population density cross a certain threshold, which typically happens to be the same urban neighbourhoods already connected. In relatively remote geographies, mobile connectivity — let alone fixed — remains patchy still.

For now, satellite broadband has limited ability to help bridge the connectivity gaps

Since satellite terminals, by design, cater to a static location, they are sort of an alternative to fixed broadband. Both cater to non-individual use cases and usually offer higher speeds, and unlike fibre, this doesn’t require you to wait for an ISP to lay out a cable.

While the technology continues to evolve, it faces two general constraints. First, satellite is slower than a wired connection — a matter of simple physics because the signal has further to travel — though in Pakistan you could well find fibre lagging behind not just satellite but even a good mobile connection. Secondly, in most markets it still costs more than what an average, or even well-off, household pays for a fixed line, even if that gap is narrowing.

So where does it make the most sense to go for satellite instead? A few segments stand out. First are the connectivity deserts — Balochistan, upper Gilgit-Baltistan, the low-density districts where neither fibre nor a tower will make much sense — served either through Universal Service Fund subsidies or community leaders sharing a dish or two across a certain radius.

Then come enterprise and continuity users, from remote offices still on VSAT (very small aperture terminal) links to premium urban households wanting a backup connection. There is also backhaul for remote towers: fewer than 18pc of Pakistan’s roughly 60,000 cellular sites are fiberised, a figure meant to reach just 35pc by 2032. And finally, the most niche of all, disaster response and mobility — floods, aviation, maritime — where the connection must survive an outage or travel with the user.

Luckily, you don’t have to take my word for it, as we can learn from comparable markets that have already run the experiment. Nigeria is considered one of Starlink’s emerging-market successes, reaching around 92,000 customers by March 2026, with demand outpacing capacity in Lagos and Abuja to the point that signups were frozen and thousands pushed onto waitlists. Bangladesh sits in the opposite corner: nine months after launch, it had just 3,990 subscribers against a fixed-broadband base of roughly 14.5m, despite effectively rolling out a red carpet for satellite connectivity.

That begs the question: what really predicts uptake of LEO (low Earth orbit)? We analysed a global panel, taking each technology as a share of households. Once you control for income, fibre and satellite tend to act as substitutes, though the effect holds only in poorer and middle-income countries and disappears among the rich.

For incumbents, this poses interesting choices. Fixed-line ISPs face a possible substitution effect at the top end, since Pakistan ranks 143rd out of 149 countries on median fixed broadband speed, at a dismal 18.21 Mbps (megabits per second), compared with 125.59 Mbps globally. There is surely a segment tired of what it is currently getting, but how big is it? Under 4.7pc of all fixed connections have advertised speeds above 30 Mbps and not even 0.5pc above 100 Mbps — roughly 215,000 connections, under 5pc of the fixed base. Not much of a market, and urban density would complicate even that.

Mobile operators, by contrast, might not face a serious direct threat, since the two go for different use cases. The real squeeze could fall on the GEO (geostationary Earth orbit)/VSAT layer, the PTCL Skylinks and Supernets, which serve exactly the enterprise, remote-site and continuity accounts satellite is built to take. To be fair, it was never a mass-market play to begin with.

For now, the case for satellite rests on the state of technology as of today. But satellite is moving fast: launch costs keep falling, each new constellation adds capacity, and competitors like Kuiper are only starting to come online. None of that changes the basic logic, which is that satellite is a complement rather than a replacement. What it does change is the size of that complement, which is likely to grow.

The question for Pakistan isn’t if there are large, even if not truly mass, use cases for satellite. It’s whether the regulation, the infrastructure and the pricing move fast enough to let it.

Abdul Aziz Malik is an ex analyst at Data Darbar and Mutaher Khan is co-founder of Data Darbar

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, August 31st, 2026