Pakistan proxies

The country is pinned with a suffix in the login. Host, port and password stay the same as for any other country.

A city goes in as a second suffix. In Pakistan that is worth doing for about seven cities; past them the choice runs out quickly.

This is the first thing to know about the Pakistani pool. Lahore holds 57 networks and Karachi 42, even though Karachi is noticeably larger by population. Thirty five networks are found only in Lahore, twenty four only in Karachi.

So picking a city by size is the wrong move here. If the job needs rotation across autonomous systems, start with Lahore. If you specifically need the port and trading city with its logistics and prices, take Karachi, but with less headroom in networks.

A live second tier follows: Faisalabad 26 networks, Rawalpindi and Islamabad 23 each, Multan 12, Gujranwala and Sialkot 10. That is better than in most countries we have gone through.

Punjab holds 54 cities of the 92 and 129 networks of the 169. Sindh gives 17 cities, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 16, while Balochistan, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan give one or two each.

That reflects the real density of population and broadband rather than a gap in the catalogue. It is still worth remembering: a country wide slice of Pakistan without a city is largely a slice of Punjab.

If you need a Sindhi or Pashtun trail specifically, set the city explicitly: Karachi and Hyderabad for Sindh, Peshawar for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The state carrier PTCL sits in the catalogue under three entries: PTCL DSL in 40 cities, PTCL Fiber in 29 and plain PTCL in 15. They cannot be added up: the sum would give 84 cities, the union gives 54. Thirty eight cities are left without PTCL.

Cybernet is also split in two, under its own name and its full legal name: the sum is 38, the union 27. Connect Communications sits under two entries.

By union the picture is this: PTCL in 54 cities, Cybernet in 27, Nayatel in 10, Transworld in 7, Wateen and Zong in 5 each. Six large options, while 130 networks of the 169 appear in exactly one city.

We checked twenty well known Pakistani domains from Europe with a full browser header set. Sixteen opened: Daraz, PakWheels, Zameen, Rozee, OLX Pakistan, Telemart, Homeshopping, the HBL, MCB and UBL banks, the FBR tax authority, NADRA, the Geo channel, and the Jazz, Zong and Nayatel carriers.

The first barrier is the familiar one: Meezan Bank and the Dawn newspaper answer through Cloudflare with a cf-mitigated header set to challenge. A residential address solves exactly this.

The second barrier is the Tunisian kind. Two hosts do not answer at the connection level: the PTA regulator site times out, and the state carrier PTCL site returns an empty reply. Note the irony: PTCL is the widest network in our Pakistani pool while its own site does not open from Europe, and we cite the VPN rules from news sources precisely because the regulator site will not answer us.

Pakistan needs to be stated plainly, because this appears on no other country page of ours. The telecoms regulator PTA introduced mandatory VPN registration for organisations and freelancers inside the country: banks, embassies, IT firms, call centres. Working through a VPN is not banned in Pakistan and personal use is not criminalised, but unregistered traffic has been throttled and blocked from time to time. Separately, PTA issues class licences to providers for data services.

How this touches you. If you are a company outside Pakistan collecting publicly posted data through a Pakistani exit, the scheme is not written about you: it covers organisations that operate inside the country themselves. If your legal entity, contractors or staff are in Pakistan, the registration requirement applies to you directly, and it is worth checking with your own lawyer before you start.

And the other side of the same coin. The same regulator determines what a Pakistani subscriber sees: blocking in the country is applied at the carrier level. So a Pakistani exit shows you a filtered internet, and if you are checking whether your landing page reaches a local audience, that has to be done from inside the country rather than guessed at.

English occupies more of the Pakistani web than you might expect: Daraz, PakWheels, Zameen, Rozee and the banks all speak English. Urdu is written in Arabic script and appears mostly in media and government material.

The currency is the Pakistani rupee and the nominal figures are large. A basket in dollars gives away a foreigner.

The country runs on a single time zone at a five hour offset and does not change its clocks. Its neighbours use half hour offsets while Pakistan uses a whole one, which is convenient.

Connections in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad hold well, and that is also where the headroom in networks sits. The second tier of Punjab is acceptable too.

Beyond the large cities, 53 cities out of 92 hold exactly one network and there is nothing to swap to inside the city. The country is also known for connectivity disruptions around political events, so long sessions are better not planned across those periods.

The short fork.

It is counted in traffic. A dollar per gigabyte.

VPN registration has its own section above, because it is the main thing that sets Pakistan apart from the other countries in our catalogue.

Beyond that: collecting publicly posted prices and processing personal data are different things, and the second is regulated separately.

A proxy changes none of what you are allowed to do. It changes only which country the request appears to come from.

Confirm the exit is Pakistani, that the session holds, and that a target with a bot check lets you in from a residential address while it does not from an ordinary one.