Pakistan’s Internet fully restored

Pakistan’s Internet connectivity, which had been disrupted by a fault in a submarine cable, was fully restored Friday, according to an executive of Pakistan Telecommunication Co. Ltd. (PTCL) in Islamabad.

“All data and voice circuits have been restored,” Junaid Khan, president and chief executive officer of PTCL told IDG News Service Friday in a telephone interview. A telecommunications services provider that is majority owned by the Pakistan government, PTCL is the country’s ISP (Internet service provider).

A fault in an undersea cable affected the Pakistan’s Internet connectivity and international telephony service since June 27. The fault was detected south of Karachi on the Sea-Me-We 3 (South East Asia Middle East Western Europe 3) submarine cable, the only cable link to Pakistan.

Repairs were completed ahead of expectations of both PTCL and the company assigned to the job.

Repairing the cable, which is located off Pakistan’s southern coast, was expected to be completed by the second week of this month, according to Omar Jassim Bin Kalban, chief executive officer of Emirates Telecommunications and Marine Services FZE (e-marine), the United Arab Emirates-based company that handled the repair. The cable rested in shallow waters, which proved challenging when navigating the repair vessel, Kalban said in an e-mail interview Wednesday.

“We were able to complete the repair faster because there was only one fault,” said Khan. “Also both PTCL and e-marine deployed large teams to work on the repair.”

The fault on Sea-Me-We 3 affected the Pakistan economy, particularly its call center industry, banks, and online stock market trading, said V.A. Abdi secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan in Karachi. The country had to make do with 100Mbps of bandwidth provided by satellite, compared to the 775Mbps of bandwidth that Pakistan was using before the cable fault, Abdi said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

PTCL is now working on reducing its dependency on the single submarine cable link, Khan said. Incidentally this has been a long-standing demand of trade associations in Pakistan. “We have invested $40 million in the Sea-Me-We 4 submarine cable, which we expect will be available to us by the end of this year,” Khan said.

Last March approximately 16 telecommunications carriers agreed to construct a new optical fibre submarine cable system linking Southeast Asia to Europe via India and the Middle East. Called Sea-Me-We 4, the cable, which spans some 20,000 kilometers, is scheduled to be ready by the third quarter of this year, and will carry telephone, Internet and various broadband data streams.

PTCL is also setting up a land cable to neighboring India, Khan said.