How students in a remote part of Pakistan mobilized during the pandemic to demand better internet from the military-run unit controlling it
but the internet is the worst of all, and a growing movement is making a lot of noise about it By @AlizehKohari https://restofworld.org/... Anup Kaphle / @anupkaphle : How far would you go to get internet access? Students in this remote region in Pakistan are climbing mountains for better WiFi signals and they're not happy about it. https://restofworld.org/... — story by @AlizehKohari, with photographs by @saiyna
Context & Ripple Effects
When COVID-19 pushed schooling online in early 2020, the gap between connected and unconnected households became an education emergency almost everywhere at once: China's rural students were cut off within weeks of the outbreak, US districts spent months scrambling for devices and hotspots, and by late November India's survey data showed roughly 38% of student households had no smartphone at all. Rest of World adds a variant with a twist: in this remote Pakistani region, the bottleneck is not just poverty or hardware but a single gatekeeper — a military-run unit controls the internet, so there is no competitive market to complain to.
That structure is familiar in Pakistan, where connectivity has long been treated as a security instrument rather than a service — the precedent being Kashmir's extended 2019 shutdown, which shut pharmacies, cash access, and online businesses along with the network. What is new here is the response: instead of waiting out the outage, students organized, climbing mountains for signal and turning poor connectivity into a public grievance aimed squarely at the operator.
First-order effects
- Students in the region are the immediate affected party: remote classes are effectively inaccessible where the signal fails, forcing workarounds like mountain climbs for WiFi while peers elsewhere attend school normally.
- The military-run unit running the network now faces organized public pressure from its own users — a constituency it cannot simply ignore the way it could diffuse complaints before the pandemic made access an education necessity.
Second-order effects
- If the campaign extracts upgrades, it hands other under-served Pakistani regions a tested playbook for pressing the same monopoly operator, converting scattered complaints into a repeatable accountability mechanism.
- For the state, every concession on civilian connectivity tightens the tension with its security-first posture — the same centralized control that enables shutdowns like Kashmir's also concentrates blame when service falls short.
Third-order effects
- The episode points toward connectivity becoming a first-order political demand in state-controlled networks: once education depends on the link, citizens organize around bandwidth the way they historically organized around utilities.
- Globally, the pandemic-era divide documented in India, Indonesia, China, and the US suggests governments that treat access as discretionary will face mobilized users demanding it as infrastructure — with the shape of that politics differing sharply between market systems and single-operator states.
The trend: The pandemic converted internet access from a consumer amenity into an education prerequisite, and in places where a single authority controls the network, that shift is turning connectivity gaps into organized political demands.