As you might have read about the news that Pakistan won a Global Mobile Award in Barcelona earlier this week, for successfully auctioning spectrum for 3G and 4G services in Pakistan, but one of ProPakistani reader thinks that Warid Telecom should be given a separate award for launching 4G LTE services without spending a single penny on 4G spectrum and yet they successfully launched the service in six cities of Pakistan.
This doesn’t end here as Warid surprised the market by managing to have grabbed over 50,000 LTE users with-in a month of its commercial launch. That’s almost 9 times of Zong’s 4G customers till the end of January 2015.
Interestingly, as some had feared, Warid managed to maintain its undisputed and proven superiority of network quality, for both voice and data users.
For those who aren’t aware, Warid didn’t buy additional spectrum for its LTE services and instead spared some spectrum from its 2G network and consumed it for LTE operations.
However, it merits mentioning here that this was possible only because Warid had lesser number of customers. For a reference, Warid had only one third customers of what Mobilink had while the spectrum size of both operators was same, which means Warid could easily afford to spare some spectrum for LTE operators, which it did.
Additionally, in order to offer better data experience that will also save spectrum, Warid has contracted SpiderCloud for small cell deployment. Through this arrangement, company will be able to serve the data needs of its customers through power full small cells that are reported to have achieved 34 Mb/s per radio node on 5MHz spectrum, which is far higher than what other telco can deliver on 3G/4G/LTE.
We know that Warid is already planning for WiFi offloading, that will further enhance and optimize the utilization of spectrum available to Warid.
And no doubt they can buy additional spectrum during the next auction (for which PTA has already started to evaluate the market and opportunities) to tap the growing spectrum needs.
All in all, Warid has tuned out to be a clear winner, with good number of LTE subscriptions and a doable plan and a strategy that has stunned the telecom experts locally and abroad.
