Smuggled mobile phones in Pakistan to stop working by year end

ISLAMABAD: The government has decided to crack down against smugglers of mobile phones in Pakistan, Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry announced on Thursday.

In a press conference following a cabinet meeting in the federal capital, Chaudhry said the government has devised a framework to block illegal imports of mobile phones by the end of this year.

“By this year’s end, [all] smuggled phones in the country will stop being operational,” he said.

According to statistics released by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the number of mobile phone users in the country reached 151 million by July 2018. The number of mobile broadband subscribers was around 60 million during the same period.

By 2017, over 30 percent of Pakistan's population was covered by the 4G network. The country saw a dramatic increase in mobile broadband penetration over the past five years, with market penetration increasing from below one percent in 2012 to 24 percent in 2017, an IT official was quoted as saying earlier this year.