Zong has attained leadership position in Pakistan’s digital revolution through its extensive and multi-layered mobile broadband solutions that it offers through a variety of products and services.
“We see Pakistan as an integrated economy during days to come, a digitalized Pakistan that will be able to compete effectively with rest of the world based on best in class data and telecom solutions that will be available to Pakistani consumers during the next couple of years,” said Niaz A Maik, Deputy CEO, Zong in an interview with ProPakistani.
“Zong’s capacity to be at the core of “Digital Revolution” is built on enormous investments that the company has made – or plans to make during next two years – on network infrastructure to ultimately meet the gigantic data demands of Pakistani market”, added Mr. Malik.
According to Deputy CEO, there’s a fundamental difference between Zong and other companies when it comes to network capacity. “While we have prepared ourselves ahead of time through very planned investments, you will get to know of capacity bottlenecks of other networks within next six months”, said Mr. Maik.
Zong invested over $1 billion during past 18 months for 3G/4G spectrum and network up-gradation, while it has plans to invest another $1 billion in next two years with $600 million during 2016 alone.
When asked if Zong will also invest in fiber for metropolitan rings, long-haul or for international bandwidth, Mr. Malik said that his company will instead continue to rely on partner networks for affordable and inexpensive bandwidth that it is currently getting. “We want to stay very focused with our investments, i.e. on data and mobile broadband,” added Mr. Malik.
He however, hinted that, down the line, Zong is likely to get international down-links through consortiums where China Mobile (its parent group) is part of such ventures.
“Our ultimate goal is to provide a mobile broadband service and experience with which the market could get to next level in terms of service offerings, products and facilities that will hugely enhance the lifestyles of the masses,” explained Niaz Malik.
Unlike other companies that are building in-house value added solutions, Zong is apparently very focused towards establishing a best-in-class network layer for current and potential partner-companies that specialize in different areas such as surveillance, security, e-health, e-education, IoT and other domains.
Niaz Malik said that his company aims to ensure network availability for high-speed broadband through 3G and especially 4G, so that broadband experience for both the consumers and the service providers is unmatched.
“Let’s take the example of e-health where only a superior network can ensure smooth experience for both the patients and the doctors. This is exactly what we are focused at: to provide ultimate connectivity solution and then partner with companies with the respective expertise to provide next-gen services and solutions to our consumers,” said Niaz Malik.
Zong said that it will continue to expand its 4G network across Pakistan and hinted us that its 3G and 4G footprints will stretch across several hundred cities with-in next two years.
It won’t be out of place to mention that Zong offers similar rates for its 2G, 3G and 4G services, meaning that users are charged at a fixed data-rate regardless of the technology they are consuming.
In addition to various 3G and 4G packages, Zong also specializes in data-only USB dongles and MiFi devices. It launched a new 4G MiFi device just recently that offers up to 200GBs of data limit per month against a monthly rental of Rs. 6,000.
