Internet services in Pakistan have been chaotic in the past one week with operators struggling with congestion on the network due to a sudden drop in backend capacities available to them.
Internet service providers encountered problems as there were outright blackouts at least four times in the past seven days because of a problem in the major submarine cable system – Southeast Asia, Middle East and Western Europe-4 (SEAMEWE4) – which is the main communications artery for westbound data and voice traffic going out of Pakistan.
Owing to this, internet connectivity offered by two submarine cable system providers – Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) with ITI and Transworld Associates Private Limited (TWA) with TW-1 – were severely affected for a short time in each of the incidences.
“Cable cuts occurred in Egypt in a narrow terrestrial corridor known in the communications world as the Egyptian crossing,” said Transworld’s Commercial Director Zulfiqar Qazilbash. The outages usually occur when cables are damaged as a result of fishing trawlers dropping anchors and nets.
The first outage occurred on March 17 from 1:57am to 11:13am, the second outage on March 20 from 4:29pm to 12:46am, the third on March 23 from 8:57pm to 10:40pm and the fourth on March 24 from 4:24pm to 4:56pm.
However, both TWA and PTCL were successfully able to prevent a prolonged outage by shifting customers to alternative routes and cable systems, but since SEMEWE4 is a major artery and a choke point, some congestion and service degradation problems were unavoidable for both companies.
“Cable cuts are a way of life and we have adequate processes to deal with such emergencies to avoid outsourcing companies losing revenue generated through calls and in the longer run, a negative reputation of
