Pakistan ranked among the lowest globally for internet speeds in the month of October, according to a report by the Ookla Speedtest Global Index.
The index ranked Pakistan at 100 out of 111 countries.
According to the World Population Review, which used data from Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index and Cable, Pakistan’s mean download speed was 7.85 MBPS with the median mobile download speed of 19.59 MBPS and median broadband download speed of 15.52 MBPS.
Not just this year but in 2023, Pakistan was ranked as having the lowest internet speeds globally.
Internet situation in Pakistan
Internet disruptions have become very common in Pakistan lately. However, the government continues to deny it and blame it on technical issues or VPNs.
WhatsApp and Instagram were down during the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) protests in Islamabad, in addition to internet outages.
The report said that severe slowdowns in both WiFi and mobile data services resulted in difficulties for users in sending and receiving media files such as images, videos, and voice notes.
IT experts are of the view that due to the extremely poor state of the internet in Pakistan, the country’s economy is losing billions of rupees daily.
The frequent outages gave rise to speculations that the slowdown of internet is caused by installation of firewall as the government wants to control digital media.
However, Minister of State for Information Technology and Telecommunication Shaza Fatima Khawaja, when asked about the firewall, said the issue had been “blown out of proportion”.
