KARACHI, July 9: The Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan is on a collision course with the Pakistan Telecommunication Company over frequent suspension of Internet connectivity.
Speaking at a press conference here on Wednesday, the Ispak secretary, V.A. Abidi, took the phone utility to task over its inability to resolve what he termed the recurring problem promptly.
He disclosed that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the city had suffered a loss of approximately five million rupees because of the PTCL fault. He added that those who were into e-commerce must have suffered more losses.
He urged the government to involve the private sector while formulating a strategy to resolve the problem once and for all.
Mr Abidi said: “It is a great pity that the PTCL has been trying to downplay the issue of frequent suspension of Internet connectivity. A top-ranking PTCL official said that only voice traffic was affected during the breakdown of the Internet network last Monday. This is wrong and misleading.”
He referred to an email sent by the PTCL network operations centre to ISPs which says: “We highly regret the inconvenience for the interruption in services due to yesterday’s heavy rain and storm, causing the following outages: SMW3 cable damage at hawks bay outage from 1540 July 7 till 0723 July 8 and antenna problem at Dahmandro Earth Station outage from 1805 July 7 till 0711 July 8. All circuits have been restored and are working well.”
Mr Abidi said that if both the networks were down, how could the PTCL suggest that only voice traffic was affected.
He pointed out that the suspension of Internet connectivity did not only affect consumers in the country. “All those who want to be in touch with Pakistanis from abroad lose their contact. The PTCL often says that because of a suspension in Internet connectivity users browsing the Internet face problems. They must realize that the Internet is not all about surfing. Money transactions also take place through the Internet. And people all over the world place orders through the Internet.”
Mr Abidi demanded that the private sector be allowed to set us four telecommunication gateways in the country. “India allowed eight gateways to be established in the private sector four years ago. The department entrusted with the task of keeping Internet connectivity operational should be outsourced to Ispak. We will ensure no loss of revenue and adequate efficiency of manpower and protect the system from internal and external cyber attacks.”
He said that the episode brought to light the inability of the PTCL to look after modern systems yet another time. “It is understandable that the PTCL does not have another undersea cable, because it is very expensive. However, it does not stand to reason why the PTCL does not have a spare critical unit whose breakdown results in the suspension of Internet connectivity.”
He recalled that an accident in the same area had brought about the suspension of Internet connectivity in the past. “The PTCL should have marked the area as vulnerable and sought to shift the cable to some other locality. But this was not done. Routing this all-important fibre cable with such high capacity through a 16-year-old duct of a non-significant analog single digit connection is a poor example of planning. Throughout the suspension period last Monday the PTCL did not the real cause of the breakdown till a patrolling party saw the old duct sunken somewhere.”
Mr Abidi said that Ispak had written letters to President General Pervez Musharraf, Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali and Minister for Science and Technology Awais Ahmed Khan Leghari.
