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Aftab Maken
A pattern of complaints — from the Senate floor to Trustpilot reviews — points to a telecom operator struggling to keep up, just as it merges with Telenor Pakistan.
Parliament escalates the pressure
Ufone’s network problems reached the Senate this week. During a meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on Cabinet Secretariat, Chairman Senator Rana Mahmood-ul-Hassan bluntly asked the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) why Ufone’s service appeared to have “collapsed.” The PTA chairman conceded the concerns were valid, noting that Ufone — a state-owned operator — was expected to see its operational issues resolved once its merger with Telenor Pakistan is completed in the coming days, forming a new combined telecom entity.
The committee also heard that Pakistan now has 210 million active SIMs in circulation, and that PTA is working with NADRA to let citizens obtain SIMs digitally through the Pak ID platform. Senator Saleem Mandviwalla separately pressed PTA on Pakistan’s slow progress toward eSIM adoption, pointing out that many other countries have already moved on from physical SIM cards.
This is not an isolated incident. It is the latest in a string of parliamentary sessions this year where Ufone has been named, specifically, as the country’s worst-performing network.
A recurring theme in the National Assembly, too
Barely three weeks earlier, the National Assembly Standing Committee on IT and Telecommunication held its own reckoning with the same issue. Chairman Syed Aminul Haque told the committee Ufone’s service quality had become “the worst” among Pakistani operators, and warned that the ongoing Ufone–Telenor merger could make things worse before they get better. Committee member Mahesh Kumar, who said he had raised the same complaint for years without seeing improvement, singled out Ufone’s Karachi network as “extremely poor.” Fellow member Sadiq Memon added that call quality had grown unreliable even in Islamabad and Karachi, Pakistan’s two largest urban centers, while member Rana Iradat Sharif warned that Telenor subscribers could see their own service quality decline once the merger closes.
PTA’s response echoed what it later told the Senate: the regulator is not claiming service quality has improved, and it is pinning its hopes on a gradual recovery once 5G is commercially rolled out. The committee wasn’t satisfied — it summoned officials from Pak Telecom Mobile Limited (PTML), Ufone’s parent operating company, to explain their improvement plans, and separately pushed PTA to take firmer regulatory action against operators that miss quality benchmarks. A related National Assembly session went further still, warning telecom firms broadly that licenses could be suspended over sustained poor service quality.
What ordinary users are saying online
Parliamentary hearings capture the institutional complaints, but the frustration is just as visible in everyday consumer feedback:
- On Trustpilot, multiple recent Ufone reviewers describe data that stops working for hours at a stretch, speeds that drop close to zero during peak evening hours, and — in one case — a Karachi-based user saying they were still getting 2G-level speeds despite paying for a premium data package.
- On ComplaintsBoard, Ufone carries an overall rating of roughly 1.6 out of 5 based on dozens of logged complaints, with the platform noting a resolution rate of only about 15%. Several complaints there are from users in underserved neighborhoods of Karachi and Lahore asking Ufone to install a tower because their area has no signal at all.
- On Complaint.pk, users report billing errors — including being charged twice for the same package after a failed transaction — alongside general dissatisfaction with customer support responsiveness.
- Community threads on platforms like Facebook’s consumer-rights groups and LinkedIn carry recurring posts describing “worst-ever” experiences with Ufone customer service and unresolved complaints.
- Even Ufone’s international roaming reliability has drawn criticism, with users on tech forums describing sudden loss of service while traveling abroad despite confirmation from Ufone that their SIM was active.
While no single complaint proves a systemic failure on its own, the volume and consistency — poor indoor and outdoor coverage, weak data speeds, dropped calls, slow complaint resolution — mirrors almost exactly what lawmakers have been describing in committee rooms.
Context: an operator already under strain
Some of this may reflect structural challenges rather than mismanagement alone. According to Wikipedia’s sourced overview of the company, Ufone operates just over 10,000 cell sites — the fewest of Pakistan’s four mobile network operators — despite serving around 29 million subscribers. Financial filings cited there also show the company posted a net loss of roughly Rs 24.6 billion in 2023, which may help explain underinvestment in network capacity relative to rivals.
The Ufone–Telenor merger, finalized in December 2025 when PTCL completed its acquisition of Telenor Pakistan’s spectrum and network assets, is being positioned by PTA and company leadership as the fix: a combined entity with a larger tower footprint and more spectrum, including holdings acquired in the 2026 spectrum auction. But lawmakers on both the Senate and National Assembly committees have explicitly warned that integrating two networks carries real risk of degrading service further in the short term, not just improving it.
The bottom line
Three separate threads point in the same direction:
- Parliament — both the Senate and National Assembly have singled out Ufone by name, in back-to-back sessions, as Pakistan’s most-criticized network operator.
- The regulator — PTA has stopped short of defending Ufone’s current performance, instead openly telling lawmakers it cannot claim service quality has improved.
- The public — independent review platforms and social channels show a consistent pattern of complaints about weak signal, poor data speeds, billing issues, and slow complaint resolution, echoing the same problems raised in committee rooms.
Whether the Ufone–Telenor merger delivers the turnaround PTA is promising will likely determine whether this pattern breaks — or whether Ufone remains parliament’s most frequently cited example of Pakistan’s telecom quality problem.
