Enabling Pakistan’s Telecommunications Industry through Digital Transformation

Equal access to digital services and smart technologies is now considered a basic human right for a lot of people. At the forefront of the movement towards digitalization lies the telecommunications industry, which in the recent decades has undergone tremendous technological development, with capacity and coverage of mobility, broadband, and internet services continuing to expand.

During the Covid-19 crisis, the importance of telecommunications services was particularly evident in keeping the world stay connected, providing support to the national healthcare system, state and local governments, enabling businesses to continue running operations and allowing students to access online education during the lockdowns.

The evolution of the communication network and competition from IT service companies is now forcing traditional TELCOS to embrace new technologies as digital service providers and bring in innovative business concepts to increase relevance to customers and maintain healthy profit margins. They will have to attract customers through personalized end-to-end experiences at each touch point. They need to listen to feedback about their services and product portfolio, employee satisfaction, and even brand strategy and respond to it accordingly in order to attain excellence. The TELCOS that can best collect, protect, and respond to data from customers will score the highest in customer preference.

Now being recognized as a prominent contributor to the country’s economy, Pakistan’s telecom sector was recently given industrial status by the government for 2021-22 and with several large-scale technological projects underway, our economy will soon no longer be alien to cutting-edge digital tools including blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning and the likes.

One of the main goals of telecommunications is survival and development, and technology adoption aligned with sustainability is required to ensure that the industry survives these turbulent times. In general, the telecommunications ecosystem is set to undergo many changes. Digital transformation is one of them, and it will play an important role in shaping the future of the telecommunications industry and enabling it to make progress in the future.