They were doing the bare minimum at first. PTA would order the ISPs to censor resources which would implement the block alone and that's it. Easy to bypass with HTTPS, a 3rd party DNS server, or a VPN. They've since bought an $18.5m web monitoring system from Sandvine and centralized the censorship under PTA. The companies don't deal with it anymore: https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/surveillance/pa...

Amortized over 100m customers, in a country where network engineers can be found for $250/month, they're pretty close to free.

It's easy to underestimate how profitable it is to run a telco

Running a telco is not that expensive. The problem is that building out the infrastructure in the first place is hugely expensive.

This is why most countries have only a few "real" operators that own and operate infra, and tons of virtual operators (MVNO) that run on top of others' gear.

Sure, but that just means it's an irrelevant factor when comparing low vs. high telecom costs.

Though my thinking is when selling censorship equipment to a country, you probably charge a country like .pk more because you know they'll find a way to pay for best-in-class.