Of late, the internet services in Pakistan have been duly affected due to aglitch that occurred in a major submarine cablelink,causing it to go offline.
The disruptions occurred earlier this week near Cairo, Egypt, at theSEA-ME-WE-5 cable that connects Pakistan internationally with TransWorld asits local partner.
Presently, Pakistan is connected to the outside world through sixsub-aquatic fiber optic cables. The two license holders of submarine cablesfor international landing stations are Transworld Associates (TWA) and thePakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL), while SCO manages thePak-China Fiber Optic Cable, which connects Pakistan with China throughKhunjerab.
The TWA is responsible for operating:
– SEA-ME-WE-5 with a design capacity of 24 Tbps – TW-1 with a design capacity of 1.28 Tbps
While the PTCL submarine cable network includes:
– SEA-ME-WE-3 with a design capacity of 480 Gbps – SEA-ME-WE-4 with a design capacity of 1.28 Tbps – I-ME-WE with a design capacity of 3.86 Tbps – AAE-1 with a design capacity of 40Tbps
SCO cable network include:
– Pak-China Fiber Optic Cable
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It wouldn’t be out of place to mention that PTCL cables are up and theirusers are not impacted by the incident.
But having said this, the 20,000KM affected cable system SEA-ME-WE-5 aloneis responsible for carrying a majority of Pakistan’s internet traffic andmeets almost half of Pakistan’s international bandwidth demands byconnecting us to Asia Pacific, Middle East and Europe.
While the technical teams are working to restore the internet connectivityand recover the lapse in the services as soon as possible, it is a giventhat it will require at least a time span of two weeks (or more) to getfully restored.
While the work is in progress, and while TWA is getting the fix done, ISPscould (rather should) shift the load to an alternate bandwidth on othersubmarine systems such as PTCL, as it turns out to be the only option forISPs to provide an immediate solution that will ease the internet users’suffering meanwhile.
It is essential to realize that while Pakistan is aiming to become acountry with digital economy based on Information Technology, reliableconnectivity is very crucial.
For a country with a large capacity of internet users, the role ofconnectivity providers to deliver more resilient network solutions becomesmore important than ever.
The system should offer improved quality of services with a more extensivenetwork of fiber cable optics that may divide the load so that there is nohindrance in case of emergencies like this.
