IMEWE is reportedly offline and any data transmission on the this international submarine cable that carries major portion of Pakistan’s internet traffic is currently not available for service, we have checked with sources.
Just in case if you are wondering, IMEWE isn’t the only cable that connects Pakistan to outside world, however, it carries major portion of country’s bandwidth. And hence its outage could degrade internet services for the consumers in the country.
It must be mentioned here that ISPs load balance the bandwidth during such outages, however, the overall demand is met with shortage of bandwidth that leaves a negative impact on internet speeds and user experience.
According to sources, who wanted to rumain unnamed, there is currently no deadline or ETA available for the restoration of IMEWE cable.
While it is too early to estimate any timeline, the full restoration could take hours, if not days.
Pakistan is currently connected with outside world through several submarine cables, but as mentioned above, IMEWE-3 carries major portion (almost 20 percent) of Pakistan’s international bandwidth.
Given the frequent outages on existing limited submarine cables, Pakistan needs to build additional submarine cables to develop redundancy and also to meet growing bandwidth capacity demand. One such cable could be PEACE.
PEACE Cable is currently being deployed and is likely to go live in next few quarters.
PEACE Cable will come with a design capacity of 96 terabits per second, which would be more than double of our current bandwidth capacity.