The engineer who built Pakistan's first fiber network

A two-year wait and a very Islamabad success story

The episode opens with Muzamil explaining that Wahaj Siraj had been on his guest list since season one — a two-year pursuit that finally closed out season four. The reason for the persistence is straightforward: Nayatel is Islamabad’s most visible homegrown technology success, and Wahaj is the man who built it from a single rented room in Blue Area.

Wahaj was born in Gujranwala — his father was posted at Mangla Dam when the dam was being built, so the family travelled there for the birth — and grew up mostly in Islamabad after his father, an army doctor, was transferred to the capital in 1971. His mother was one of the first women from Gujranwala to enter Fatima Jinnah Medical College. His grandfather held four master’s degrees — in Arabic, Persian, English, and Oriental languages. Education, Wahaj says, was the family’s only real currency.

The doctor’s house that produced an engineer

In a household where every child was expected to become a doctor, Wahaj’s rebellion was quiet but firm. His mother ran a clinic from home; the smell of tincture and the sight of syringes being boiled for reuse were enough to put him off biology permanently. “Mujhe biology buri lagti thi,” he says — he found biology repellent — and he told his mother plainly that he would fail the subject on purpose if forced to study it. His parents eventually gave in.

He went to Gordon College for FSC and then to UET Lahore for mechanical engineering, graduating in 1986. He is disarmingly honest about the quality of his education. “Main bahut bahut bura engineer tha,” he says — a very, very bad engineer. He passed by rote memorisation. “Aaj tak mujhe samajh nahin aayi ke integration kyun karte the” — to this day he does not understand why they did integration. The degree said first division; the understanding, he admits, was thin.

Thirteen years in government, one moment of shame

After graduating, Wahaj joined the government — first a short stint at a national transport research centre, then a more permanent post at what was then called the Appropriate Technology Council. He spent roughly thirteen years in government service, ending as Principal Staff Officer to Dr Atta-ur-Rahman when the first Ministry of IT and Telecom was created under Musharraf around 2000–2001.

The formative moment came early. His boss asked him to draft a letter — a routine DFA, draft for approval — and Wahaj could not do it. Rather than accept the humiliation of being corrected by a superior, he went to a family friend who was a teacher and paid for private tuition in Urdu composition. “Sirf khauf ki wajah se” — purely out of fear of embarrassment — he taught himself to write. It is a detail that recurs throughout the conversation: Wahaj’s most important skills were acquired not in classrooms but under the pressure of specific, personal stakes.

Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, he says, was a genuine task master — meticulous, high-energy, and incorruptible. On one thirteen-day international trip covering London, New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Singapore, Wahaj was responsible for notes, coordination, letters, and protocol from morning breakfast meetings until late at night. “Singapore aaya to mujhe laga ke main mar jaunga” — by Singapore he thought he would die. Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, he recalls, was still full of energy.

He also witnessed the other side of government. In 2000, a divisional engineer’s posting transfer at PTCL carried a standard bribe of five hundred thousand rupees, paid directly to the minister’s office. A priority telephone connection — in an era when fixed lines had waiting lists of six months to a year — cost one thousand rupees at the ministry. Dr Atta-ur-Rahman issued an official letter ending both practices on his first day. “Minister office ke log mujhe mazak karte the: sir aapne hamari rozi palat maar di” — the ministry staff joked that he had destroyed their livelihoods.

The wallet with five hundred rupees

The decision to leave government was not ideological. It was financial. Wahaj married in 1993, moved out of his parents’ house within four months, and found himself in a small rented flat with a salary that could not cover basic needs. The moment he describes most vividly: his daughter, about eight months old, was weak and not yet crawling. A doctor prescribed an imported vitamin supplement. Wahaj went to a pharmacy in Blue Area, asked the price — one thousand rupees — opened his wallet, and found five hundred. He came home without the medicine.

“Mere jeb mein paise nahin the” — there was no money in his pocket. That was the day, he says, that the decision was made. He and his wife used to shop for second-hand clothes at the Sunday market. His government pension, after thirteen years of service, amounted to almost nothing. He walked away from it.

A PC shop, a dial-up ISP, and Pakistan’s first DSL service

Wahaj and two partners — one of whom was an SDO in Punjab’s highway department, equally determined to earn only halal income — started a computer assembly shop in Blue Area, in the same GD Arcade building where Nayatel’s offices now occupy roughly 70 percent of the floors. They assembled machines to order: customer specifies motherboard, processor, RAM; they buy parts from a wholesaler, assemble overnight, deliver the next day. The shop ran under the name Micronet.

From the shop they moved to a dial-up ISP, then in 2002 launched what Wahaj describes as Pakistan’s first-ever DSL broadband service, also under the Micronet Broadband name, with twenty employees. PTCL, a sixty-thousand-person company, had the copper infrastructure but was not offering DSL itself. Wahaj’s team proposed that PTCL open the network to private operators. PTCL issued an RFP; Micronet bid and won.

The DSL business worked technically but created a customer service nightmare. Every fault on the copper line required a PTCL lineman. Every lineman expected a payment. “Hamare gaaliyan bari padti thin” — customers blamed Micronet for faults that were PTCL’s. Wahaj decided the only way out was to own the last mile entirely.

Why fiber, and why passive

The shift to fiber-to-the-home was driven by a specific engineering logic that Muzamil, as an early Nayatel customer, found striking even at the time. Wahaj explains it plainly: a coaxial HFC network requires powered cabinets in the street — cabinets that need electricity, need UPS backup, and get robbed. A fiber network from exchange to home is entirely passive. There is nothing along the route that needs power and nothing worth stealing.

“Pakistan mein load shedding ki problem thi aur hamein kaha tha ke yeh rehni hai saari umr” — load-shedding was permanent, theft was permanent, and any network that depended on street-level powered equipment would be a permanent nightmare. Fiber eliminated both problems in one decision.

Nayatel was also the first company in Pakistan to use an underground boring machine rather than cutting roads. They bored under Constitution Avenue, under driveways, under footpaths. They put stickers on their vehicles asking “How am I driving?” and held their own staff accountable when a team member was photographed littering. “Branding aapki har cheez mein reflect hoti hai” — branding shows up in everything, Wahaj tells Muzamil, not just in advertising.

Muzamil, who was among Nayatel’s earliest customers in Islamabad, tells Wahaj directly: “Very little things in Pakistan have made me so proud as using your service has made me.” Wahaj’s response is equally direct: “Paisa to saare kamate hain. Yeh hai ke paisa with dignity and with a good thing — yeh cheez mujhe inspire karti hai.”

The Jazz acquisition that almost happened

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises a story that circulated widely in Pakistan’s telecom industry: Jazz had been close to acquiring Nayatel, perhaps four or five years before the recording. Wahaj confirms it. Jazz’s parent company Veon was aggressively pursuing a fixed-mobile convergence strategy — FMC — and Nayatel was the natural acquisition target. The deal was structured as a 100 percent acquisition, with the existing management team continuing for four or five years to expand the business before exiting.

It collapsed at the last moment because Veon changed its global CEO and senior management. The incoming leadership did not share the same conviction about FMC. “Amir Ibrahim aaj bhi kehta hai: hum chaar din late ho gaye, zaroor hamara SPA sign ho jaata” — Jazz’s Pakistan CEO still says they were four days late and the share purchase agreement would have been signed.

Wahaj uses the near-miss to make a broader point about business structure. A business that is compliant, process-dependent, and growing can be sold like a plot of land — at any time, to any buyer. A business that exists only in the founder’s head, that is not structured, that does not follow the law, has no market value regardless of its monthly cash flow. “Jo business grow nahin kar raha, structured nahin hai, usko koi buy nahin karega — chahe woh das crore mahine ke kyun na kama raha ho.”

How the regulator became the problem

The conversation’s sharpest section is Wahaj’s account of what has gone wrong with Pakistan’s telecom policy since the early 2000s. The Musharraf era, he says, was genuinely progressive: deregulation was pushed aggressively, private operators were given room, and the ministry moved fast. That era is over.

He offers a specific comparison. India’s telecom regulator TRAI spends, in equivalent Pakistani rupee terms, roughly one billion Indian rupees annually to regulate a sector with revenues of around eight trillion Pakistani rupees. PTA spends 3.5 billion Pakistani rupees to regulate a sector roughly one-twentieth the size. “PTA is spending 13 times more than TRAI” per unit of sector revenue — and delivering, in Wahaj’s assessment, almost nothing in return.

The structural problem is that telecom is a fully documented, fully compliant industry. Every rupee of revenue is on record. Every tax is paid. That makes it an easy target. “Government ne dono sides se squeeze kiya” — the government has squeezed from both sides, taxing revenue upfront while providing zero facilitation. Spectrum licence fees are denominated in dollars; operators earn in rupees. A licence that cost the equivalent of a certain amount in 2000 now costs three times as much in real terms because of currency depreciation, with no adjustment mechanism.

Wahaj describes attending a prime ministerial task force meeting where a senior official presented a three-month progress report. The single achievement listed: a letter had been written to the FBR. “Sir, it takes one hour by a section officer to write a bloody letter. Aap is ko teen mahine ki progress mein show kar rahe hain?” He says he tells regulators this to their faces, and they are offended. He says it anyway.

He also describes being sent a legal notice by NAB after he posted on social media defending colleagues who had been charged with causing losses to the government through a spectrum auction. “NAB ne mujhe notice bhej diya. Literally.” The charge was abetting a crime. The colleagues, he notes, did not even have money to pay their lawyers.

What Pakistan looks like in 2050

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Wahaj the question he puts to every guest: what does Pakistan look like in 2050? Wahaj’s answer is cautiously optimistic. Today’s young Pakistanis, he says, are twenty times more aware than his generation was at the same age. They are watching the mistakes of current leadership and learning from them. The current generation of leaders — “including ourselves,” he adds — will be gone. A new generation will take over.

His prescription for government is minimal and specific: provide internal security, fix the justice system, and spend money on education and health. Everything else — job creation, innovation, exports, growth — is the private sector’s job. “Government ka kaam business karna nahin hai.” Regulations written in the 1800s that are still on the books should be cut. Departments should be trimmed. The government should be running at seventy kilograms, not two hundred.

The private sector, in turn, has to become compliant and structured — not because it is morally required, but because an unstructured business cannot grow, cannot be sold, and cannot survive the next generation. Pakistan has the raw material: young graduates entering the workforce in large numbers. “Unko polish karna hai” — they need to be polished. Half may leave for abroad. Half will stay. Both groups, Wahaj argues, will contribute.