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Wi-tribe

wi-tribe (/ˈwˌtrb/ WYE-trybe) was a Pakistani internet service provider that operated in four major cities; Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, and Karachi until its license was revoked by Pakistan Telecommunication Authority because of frequent service interruption in October 2021.

In 2009, the wi-tribe group, owned by Qatar Telecom (now Ooredoo) launched its largest operations in Pakistan. In Pakistan, wi-tribe is operating in Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, and Rawalpindi.

Qatar Telecom invested in WiMAX technology which, was the leading technology at the time, and set up over 600 towers for base stations across its network at a cost close to $200 million USD.

In March 2016, wi-tribe was acquired by the HB Group from Ooredoo.

In 2020, due to a critical problem with the tower management business, edotco, the company ceased operations in Lahore. The situation arose because of a disagreement between the companies, which worsened after the departure of the highly regarded edotco group head, Suresh Sidhu; ostensibly, the disagreement was over a service-level agreement and the renegotiation of tower rentals due to the expiration of land-owner leases, with edotco negotiating in a way that would result in huge increases and premiums being demanded from wi-tribe. Here, edotco was trying to use the deliberate shutdown of wi-tribe base stations on edotco towers as a bargaining chip in a business dispute. As a kind of vengeance, wi-tribe stopped making payments. The now-fired CEO of edotco Pakistan, Arif Hussain, responded by shutting down the towers in key cities, leaving customers without access to broadband.

 In November 2016, the management considered investing in 4G LTE home broadband to upgrade its services to meet customer expectations for speed and capacity. The wi-tribe board later announced that it would skip a generation and instead of adopting 4G technology, it would shift to 4.5G LTE Advanced (LTE-A) technology. 

In February 2017, wi-tribe announced that it had signed a contract with Huawei to upgrade its entire network from WiMAX to an LTE-A (4.5G) network, the most advanced broadband technology in the world.  

This deployment represented the first such network in South Asia and the Middle East operating 4.5G LTE-A on the 3.5GHz spectrum (3500 MHz) band. 

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