How to Start an ISP Business in Pakistan (2026 Guide)

How to Start an ISP Business in Pakistan (2026 Guide)

Short answer: Since January 2026, a registered company can apply to PTA for a district-level Class Licence and sell internet inside one district. The PTA fees are Rs 300,000 once plus Rs 100,000 for year one. That is the cheap part. Bandwidth, last-mile cable, equipment, staff and a 100-customer target in year one cost far more than the licence.

This guide gives the licence steps, the real costs, the rules that can stop you, and the problems nobody mentions in the PTA announcement.

What is a PTA district level internet licence?

It is a Class Licence from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) that lets a small or medium business provide internet in one district. PTA announced it on 1 January 2026 and it runs for 10 years (PTA).

It exists to bring broadband and fibre to areas the big operators ignore. PTA issued its first district licence in February 2026, and reported 47 licences by the end of June (Profit). A later report puts the number at 300 (ProPakistani), but PTA has not published that figure, so 47 is the better supported count.

How much does a PTA ISP licence cost?

Year one to PTA: about Rs 420,000. Over 10 years the PTA fees add up to roughly Rs 1.9 million (my calculation from the 10% yearly rise, not an official figure). Late payment adds 2% a month (clause 3.2.1 of the licence). PTA says fees can change, so check the portal before you pay.

Who can apply?

From the PTA checklist as summarised by Pakera (verify against the PTA template):

• You must be an SECP-registered company or a registered firm. A person cannot apply alone.
• The company's objects must include telecom or internet services.
• One entity gets one district licence. Parent, subsidiaries and common-ownership companies cannot hold a district licence elsewhere.
• You cannot already hold a local loop, long distance, mobile or infrastructure licence.
• You must not be a PTA defaulter.

What documents do you need?

1. SECP incorporation certificate, memorandum and articles (certified, under 3 months old)
2. Shareholder list (Form A) and director list (Form 9)
3. Notarised CNICs of directors and the authorised person
4. Board resolution naming the authorised person
5. Technical plan: where your NOC will be, who supplies bandwidth and last mile, and your equipment list with make, model and cost
6. Project cost statement and bank statements showing you can fund it
7. Undertaking on Rs 100 stamp paper
8. Viability plan: expected customers in year one, monthly price, running costs, competitors in the district

Items 5, 6 and 8 are where most weak applications will fail. Write real numbers.

How do you apply? (step by step)

1. Check your company can legally apply (see eligibility).
2. Pick the district and survey it: who already serves it, which areas have no fibre or only poor DSL.
3. Sign up bandwidth and last-mile suppliers (see below). You need names for the application.
4. Prepare the technical plan and viability plan.
5. Apply on the PTA portal: eservices.pta.gov.pk. Use the template and checklist on the PTA Class VAS Licences page.
6. After approval, pay the initial fee and year-one annual fee. The licence only takes effect after payment.
7. Get your supplier SLAs approved by PTA before you start selling.
8. Start service within 12 months.

Where does your bandwidth come from?

You cannot bring in international bandwidth yourself. Under the licence terms as summarised by Pakera, you buy it from PTCL, an LDI licensee or a local loop licensee. Your last mile must come from a local loop or infrastructure licensee, PTCL, or an existing PEMRA cable network. You may lay your own cable only if no operator offers infrastructure within three months, and only with PTA approval.

Wireless point-to-point links in the ISM band must be registered with the Frequency Allocation Board.

What equipment do you need?

A small FTTH or wireless ISP typically needs:

• Core router / BNG (MikroTik is common at this size) to terminate customers
• RADIUS / AAA for logins, speed profiles and expiry
• Billing that records every payment
• Monitoring (SNMP, uptime, bandwidth graphs)
• Syslog / logging server so you can answer a regulator or law-enforcement request
• OLT and ONTs for fibre, or access points and CPEs for wireless
• Fibre, ducting, splitters and power backup at the NOC and cabinets

Price benchmarks I could verify, all rough:

• ONT: a Huawei HG8546M retails at about Rs 18,000 to 22,000 (listing).
• GPON build cost per home passed: the World Bank estimates US$172 to 183 in dense zones, and about 34% more when a metro network is needed (World Bank). That study is about 2.5 years old.
• There is no public price for OLTs or wholesale bandwidth per Mbps in Pakistan. Get written quotes. Anyone who gives you a confident number without a quote is guessing.

The brutal reality

This is the part the news articles skip.

1. The licence is a small fraction of the real cost. An illustrative example, with assumptions marked: 100 FTTH customers, USD at Rs 280 (assumed). At about US$175 per home passed, that is roughly Rs 49,000 per home, or about Rs 4.9 million for 100 homes. Add ONTs at around Rs 20,000 each if you give them away (Rs 2 million), the NOC, and PTA fees. You are near Rs 7 to 8 million before bandwidth and salaries. This is an illustration, not a quote. Wireless is cheaper but has its own limits.

2. You are a reseller of someone else's pipe. Wholesale resale is banned for you, you cannot import bandwidth, and your last mile may belong to a competitor. Your supplier sets your cost, and you compete against PTCL, which already sells 100 Mbps at about Rs 12,299 a month and 20 Mbps at Rs 3,449 (INCPak).

3. 100 customers is the floor, not the goal. PTA expects at least 100 broadband subscribers within a year of your commencement certificate. At an assumed Rs 3,000 average a month, 100 customers bring in Rs 300,000 a month before bandwidth, power, rent, salaries and fault repair. Real profit starts at several hundred customers.

4. Your district is your cage. One district, one licence, NOC inside the district. Growth to a second district needs a different licence route, and the Fixed Local Loop route is far more expensive (US$10,000 fee according to ProPakistani, a 2022 figure).

5. No franchisees. You cannot hand the network to local "dealers" to run under your licence. Many informal ISPs work that way today. Under this licence it is not allowed.

6. Compliance never stops. You must run a 24/7 NOC, keep session logs for a year and billing records for three, file QoS records monthly and a network report by 31 July, keep a disaster recovery plan, and get supplier SLAs approved. PTA can walk in without notice. Miss the one-year launch date and you risk the licence.

7. Crowded does not mean empty. Busy districts will see several new entrants, so check who already serves yours before you apply.

Who should not start: anyone who needs fast profit, has no technical person in the team, or cannot fund the first year with no revenue.

What does the PTA licence require from your software and network?

This is the part most guides skip. The official PTA district-level Class Licence template (31 pages, dated 31 Dec 2025) states these requirements in the licence text itself:

One more thing to know: PTA's Critical Telecom Data and Infrastructure Security Regulations 2025 (CTDISR-2025) say they apply to all PTA licensees. The version notified on 29 October 2025 requires tamper-proof access logs kept for at least one year, MFA where applicable, and a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan. It also requires SIEM integration with PTA's national SOC (nTSOC). How PTA applies the heaviest parts to a small district ISP is not yet clear, so ask PTA or a compliance consultant before you assume.

Everything above is a requirement, so build it in before launch, not after your first inspection.

What software stack does a small ISP need?

A practical setup for a MikroTik-based ISP, mapped to the requirements above:

1. MikroTik router as PPPoE server. It terminates your customers. Our MikroTik router setup guide for a small ISP covers the basics.
2. RADIUS (AAA). Each customer logs in with a username and password. RADIUS applies the speed profile and expiry date, and its accounting records feed your session logs. A common pattern is PPPoE on MikroTik with FreeRADIUS and a database behind it, with speed limits sent from RADIUS using the Mikrotik-Rate-Limit attribute.
3. Billing. Invoices, payments, reminders, auto-suspend. Needs to be system generated and kept 3 years.
4. Monitoring (NMS). SNMP graphs, uptime, alerts, outage history. This is your NOC evidence.
5. Syslog / log server. One year of session and security logs, protected against tampering.
6. Backups and a written DR plan. (See our disaster recovery plan guide.) Config backups of every router, database backups off-site, and a restore test.

Config example (a real client build is described below): the core MikroTik commands to send PPPoE logins to a RADIUS server and ship logs to a syslog server look like this. Replace the placeholder addresses and secret, and test on a lab router first.

/radius add service=ppp address=203.0.113.10 secret=CHANGE_ME timeout=3s
/ppp aaa set use-radius=yes accounting=yes interim-update=5m
/system logging action add name=remote-syslog target=remote remote=203.0.113.20 remote-port=514
/system logging add topics=ppp,account action=remote-syslog

Interim updates every few minutes mean your accounting records stay useful even if a session ends badly. If the RADIUS server goes down, customers cannot log in, so run it on stable hardware with backups.

Build or buy? There are open-source options like ABillS and many paid ones (for example Splynx, ISPFY, Visp). Vendor pricing pages are self-reported, so ask for a trial and check Pakistani payment support (JazzCash, Easypaisa, bank transfer) yourself, because vendors rarely document it.

A sensible 90-day plan

• Days 1 to 15: Check eligibility, pick the district, talk to at least three bandwidth and last-mile suppliers, get written quotes.
• Days 15 to 45: Build the technical plan and viability plan. Register the company or amend its objects if needed.
• Days 45 to 60: Apply on the PTA portal.
• After approval: Pay fees, get SLAs approved, build the NOC, test with 10 friendly users, then sell.

How Alnafy Solutions can help

The licence asks for four things in software: logins and accounting, monitoring, logs and billing records. We build exactly that stack for small ISPs:

• MikroTik setup for PPPoE and speed profiles
• Cloud RADIUS for customer logins, expiry and accounting records (supports the one-year session log requirement)
• Cloud NMS for monitoring, alerts and outage history (supports the 24/7 NOC and QoS records)
• Cloud Syslog for log storage you can show to PTA

We do not apply for the PTA licence for you, supply bandwidth, build fibre or give legal advice. If you are preparing the technical plan for your application, book a call and we will check it against the licence clauses above.

Case study: Apna Fiber, Sargodha

Client: Apna Fiber, an FTTH/PPPoE ISP in Sargodha with several thousand residential and commercial subscribers. Network: Three upstream transit providers, a central BNG / aggregation router and a FreeRADIUS AAA backend.

The problem

1. CDN cache misses and buffering. Each of the three upstreams had its own peering links and on-net CDN caches (Google GGC, Netflix OCA, Meta, Akamai). If a subscriber on ISP-1 got a DNS answer from another upstream's resolver, the traffic went to a distant server. Result: buffering and higher latency.
2. Asymmetric routing and uRPF drops. Traffic leaving through one upstream and replies returning through another caused dropped connections and packet loss.
3. Manual routing changes. Moving a user to a different upstream (for example a low-latency lane for gaming or a corporate customer) meant editing rules on the core router by hand.

What we built

• One RADIUS profile per upstream: Profile_ISP1_Transit, Profile_ISP2_Transit, Profile_ISP3_Transit.
• Attributes pushed at PPPoE login:
  • A routing tag, such as Mikrotik-Address-List := "LIST_ISP1".
  • The matching upstream's recursive DNS, through MS-Primary-DNS-Server and MS-Secondary-DNS-Server.
• Policy-based routing on the BNG: separate routing tables (to_ISP1, to_ISP2, to_ISP3). Mangle rules send each subscriber's traffic out of its assigned upstream, through that upstream's own source-NAT / CGNAT pool.
• DNS and CDN alignment: a local recursive resolver on each upstream path, so EDNS Client Subnet queries land on the right local peering cache.

Results (as reported by the client)

• No cross-provider CDN leaks. YouTube, Netflix and social media streams are served from the cache of the subscriber's assigned provider, which cut transit cost and improved quality.
• No more asymmetric routing. Each profile leaves and returns through its own gateway and NAT pool, so the uRPF drops and packet stalls stopped.
• Control from the billing panel. Support and billing staff can change a user's upstream, DNS and latency tier by switching the RADIUS profile, without touching the core router.

Why it matters for a new ISP: if your district licence lets you buy from more than one upstream, this is how you keep that traffic under control. It is also an example of what the licence expects from software: policy tied to an authenticated user, not to someone's manual router edits.

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Sources and checks

• PTA announcement, 1 Jan 2026
• Profit: 47 licences
• ProPakistani: 300 licences (unconfirmed count)
• PTA district-level Class Licence template (official PDF, 31 Dec 2025)
• PTA CTDISR-2025 (official PDF, notified 29 Oct 2025)
• Pakera: documents and eligibility (secondary source)
• World Bank: GPON cost benchmarks

Rules and fees change. Check the PTA portal before you pay or apply. This is information, not legal advice.