Telenor Pakistan

Telenor, a Norwegian telecommunications company, acquired a license for providing GSM services in Pakistan in April 2004, and launched its services commercially in Karachi, Islamabad, and Rawalpindi on 15 March 2005; it expanded its services to Lahore, Faisalabad and Hyderabad on 23 March 2005. Telenor Pakistan's corporate headquarters are in Islamabad, with regional offices in Peshawar, Lahore, Faisalabad, Multan, Hyderabad, Quetta and Karachi.

In November 2017, Telenor Pakistan inaugurated its new headquarters building in Islamabad, named '345' after Telenor's number dialing prefix '0345'. The new headquarter was built at a cost of $80 million.

Acquisition by PTCL Group

After Telenor ASA announced in November 2022 that they would leave the Pakistani market, it was announced that PTCL Group would acquire 100% of Telenor Pakistan on 14 December 2023, subject to regulatory approvals. The Business Recorder reported that the sale was settled at 108 billion Pakistani rupees (US$385 million), while Dawn and NRK reported a price of 5.3 billion Norwegian kroner (US$493 million).

On 1 October 2025, the CCP approved PTCL's acquisition of Telenor Pakistan, this was followed by the PTA's approval 6 December 2025.

PTCL completed its acquisition of Telenor Pakistan and Orion Towers (Private) Limited on 31 December 2025.

PTCL Group CEO Hatem Bamatraf announced that the Telenor Pakistan brand will be dissolved once the merger between Telenor Pakistan and Ufone is complete and all the necessary approvals have been given by the regulatory authorities.

Merger with Ufone

On 1 July 2026, the Islamabad High Court approved the merger between Telenor Pakistan and Pak Telecommunication Mobile Limited (Ufone).

As part of the integration between both networks, Ufone has migrated to the Telenor '345' headquarters building in Gulberg Greens, Islamabad. Hatem Bamatraf, who previously served as the Group CEO for both PTCL and Ufone will now lead the MergeCo as the new CEO. PTCL will operate as a separate entity with its own board and CEO.

Coverage

Telenor Pakistan covers more than 80% of Pakistan's population in urban and rural areas with a network of over 12,000 cell sites of which 80% are 3G and 70% are 4G enabled. The company has been awarded a number of projects under Universal Service Fund (USF) of which the one currently in progress in the Broadband for Sustainable Development (BSD) program under which more than 100 new cell sites will be established to bring connectivity to 1.7 million in Dera Ismail Khan and Mohmand Agency. In the past, Telenor worked on USF Projects for cell site installation in Bahawalpur-Cholistan district in 2009 and provision of 3G services in Kohistan district in 2017.

Sales and distribution

Telenor Pakistan's distribution network has over 220,000 touch points across Pakistan that include franchises, sahulat ghars and retailers that offer GSM products and Easypaisa services. In 2017, company owned customer sales and service centers were converted to Digital Customer Touch Points that include Self Service Booths, IVR, web and social media customer services.

Next generation mobile services (NGMS)

Telenor is the first to officially launch 4.5G (LTE Advanced) in Pakistan. It has done so by aggregating two 4G bands, FDD-LTE Band 5 (850 MHz) with 10 MHz bandwidth and FDD-LTE Band 3 (1800 MHz) with 5 MHz / 10 MHz bandwidths, a portion of which has been re-farmed for 4G, it was previously used on the 2G (GPRS/EDGE) network. Telenor's LTE-A network was initially available in all major cities of Pakistan.

VoLTE

After conducting trials and internal testing, Telenor Pakistan launched Voice over LTE (VoLTE) on 29 January 2019. This makes it the first network in Pakistan to launch VoLTE. Telenor's VoLTE in Pakistan is based on an open source platform and has been developed in-house. Initially, support for other smartphone OEMs was not enabled despite claims of it being supported. Recently, Telenor's VoLTE services were enabled for select smartphone models, such as Oppo and Realme.