State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

The root cause for the cut sea cables which resulted disruption of Internet in Middle East and South Asia - but not Pakistan - has been a hot discussion item. We covered the previous major disruption due to natural disaster here. I have also seen the press releases about the new submarine cable – India-Middle East-Western Europe (I-ME-WE) – from a consortium of nine operators including PTCL which is supposedly investing 50M$. Got many emails on the topic and wanted to share one where Umar Kalim’s note is mentioned by Slashdot.

Analysts have been studying the effects of the fibre outage throughout the Mediterranean in terms of network performance, by examining the changes in packet losses, latencies and throughput. We initially discussed the outage yesterday. ‘It is interesting that some countries such as Pakistan were mainly unaffected, despite the impact on neighboring countries such as India. This contrasts dramatically to the situation in June - July 2005, when due to a fibre cut of SEAMEWE3 off Karachi, Pakistan lost all terrestrial Internet connectivity which resulted, in many cases, in a complete 12 day outage of services. This is a tribute to the increased redundancy of international fibre connectivity installed for Pakistan in the last few years.

Here’s a good summary of the issue - from WSJ:

A ship’s anchor lying at the bottom of the sea was behind one of the two cuts last week in undersea Internet cables around the Middle East that caused dramatic outages across the region, the cable-owner company said Friday.

FLAG Telecom said its repair ship managed to recover one end of the cut Falcon cable in the Persian Gulf, 35 miles north of Dubai, between the Emirates and Oman.

At the site, the FLAG crew discovered an abandoned ship’s anchor which the company said was behind the cut last Friday. The anchor, weighing over 5.5 tons, was pulled up to the surface. The FLAG repair ship is now trying to reconnect the cable. The repairs are expected to be done by Sunday despite rough weather conditions, FLAG said.

Meanwhile, a second ship was continuing repair work off the north coast of Egypt, where the first undersea cable was cut Jan. 30, near the Egyptian port city of Alexandria.

That cuts involved two cables — the FLAG Europe-Asia cable, owned by FLAG, which stands for Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe, and another cable lying next to it, identified as SEA-ME-WE 4, or South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 cable, owned by a consortium of 16 international telecommunication companies.

It wasn’t yet clear what had caused the other cut, on a very narrow route linking Egypt and Palermo, on the Italian island of Sicily. Egypt’s telecommunication ministry has said no ships were registered near the location when the cut occurred north of Alexandria. The repairs off Egypt are also expected to be completed by Sunday, FLAG said.

The two unusual cuts — within two days of one another and involving three Internet cables — led to disruptions in services, slowed down businesses and hampered personal Internet usage. FLAG said it has fully restored circuits to some customers and switched others to alternative routes.