July 9, 2005

The PTCL is missing the point. No one blames it for the fault, but it is undoubtedly answerable to all internet users for its inability to demonstrate foresight

LIKE MOST other people his age, Ahmed decided to go online one evening late last month, after a particularly gruelling day at college. He wanted to chat with a few friends, send a few emails and download a couple of wallpapers before hitting the bed that night. He was in for a rude shock.

Ahmed could neither log on to MSN Messenger nor could he check his Gmail, nor for that matter the latest movie listings at Yahoo!. After connecting and reconnecting for the umpteenth time, he figured that there was something seriously wrong with his computer — a virus, Spyware or perhaps even unprecedented data corruption.

When scanning didn’t help, his thoughts turned towards a possible system failure and so Ahmed did the needful. He formatted his hard drive, reinstalled Windows and went to bed, cursing those mysterious forces in the universe that had wrecked his computer.

Of course, next morning when he woke up he realized that his anger was misdirected. He should have been hurling abuses at the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) as the undersea cable that connects Pakistan to the rest of the world had been damaged. Commonly known as the South East Asia, Middle East, Western Europe-3 (SEA-ME-WE-3), this submarine communication cable was damaged on June 27 about 58km from the gateway exchange, southwest off Karachi.

Laid with the help and approval of a consortium of 90 countries, including Singapore, Malaysia, China, France, India, Oman and Djibouti, SEA-ME-WE-3 is, or at least was, Pakistan’s only online link with the rest of the world. As a result of the fault, a long internet blackout was experienced throughout the country, though Mashkoor Hussain, PTCL’s senior executive vice-president, prefers to call it merely “a considerable degradation of internet services.” Connectivity did, of course, improve minimally later on but the damage had already been done — businesses lost billions, home users could not send emails or make international calls and predictably, Pakistan became a laughing stock among foreign investors and corporations.

Now, undersea fibre-optic cables are susceptible to such catastrophes. After all, they lie deep within the ocean and just about anything, from a rough sea to cargo ships to tremors in the earth’s crust, can cause damage. That is really not an issue to begin with. “The problem is that we don’t have a back-up,” says V.A. Abidi, secretary of the Internet Services Providers Association of Pakistan (Ispak).

“The use of undersea cables for communications is standard practice around the world but we are perhaps the only country which does not have an alternative arrangement, should anything happen to our main cable.” In all honesty, it isn’t rocket science and the PTCL surely knows of the importance of a stand-by link. Even the simplest of technical systems, like personal computers, require back-ups.

So why not this cable, which is responsible for all data transfer that takes place over the internet in Pakistan? “We did not think that Pakistan would require an additional cable,” is Mashkoor Hussain’s very candid and incredulous response. “We thought one cable was sufficient for Pakistan.

“About four years ago, we did sign an agreement for another cable called Flagweb but it was not commercially viable. SEA-ME-WE-4 was approved in 2003 and it will be ready by October this year,” he adds.

Given the PTCL’s nonchalant take on the problem, one can’t help but wonder at the mindset that drives the organization. It’s not about what the country needs; it’s about having a disaster management plan and a good one at that. “It’s really ridiculous if you think about it. How can we not need a back-up?” is the pointed question posed by the Cybernet’s CEO and Ispak’s president, Ansar-ul-Haque.

“How is it that another fibre-optic cable was not feasible back then, but now, when we’re in the middle of this crisis, suddenly the PTCL is announcing completion of SEA-ME-WE-4 by October? For the past eight years, we have been suggesting to the ministry, the PTCL and the PTA to build another cable for Pakistan but they did not listen to us.”

Clearly, Ispak’s requests fell on deaf ears, for not only were their recommendations ignored, but their proposal suggesting the creation of private gateways for large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) was also rejected. In fact, many countries in the consortium have already established such gateways along with laying down additional cables, India being a case in point. The country has set up eight private gateways, apart from installing two undersea cables, the latter of which was in place way back in 1999.

India’s foresightedness is commendable, for now, even if the main cable is damaged, it has sufficient backup to support the country’s existing internet infrastructure. “We even quoted India’s example to the ministry but they did not allow us to follow suit. You see, it is all about protecting PTCL’s interests, for had the ministry or the PTA allowed us to do something like this, PTCL’s revenues would have decreased,” continues Mr Haque, enraged by the authorities’ callousness.

What’s worse, similar faults have occurred in the past — the first one took place on April 4, 2003, the second on July 9 the same year, and the third was fairly recent, on March 26. And yet PTCL claims: “This is the first time this fault has occurred. So as an organization, we cannot be held accountable or responsible for this disaster,” maintains Hussain. The company, of course, is missing the point.

No one blames them for the fault, but they are undoubtedly answerable to all internet users for their inability to exercise caution and to demonstrate farsightedness. While the organization is making tall claims about the provision of additional satellite space, which represents a temporary solution to the problem, the fact of the matter is that this is nowhere close to the original bandwidth of 775MB provided by SEA-ME-WE-3. “The additional space translates into a mere two per cent restoration of our actual capacity,” claims Mr Haque. “And it’s not just me who is saying this. I got this figure from a PTCL report, but on TV they keep on saying that they have restored 40-50 per cent of the capacity. Why do they keep misleading?”

The absence of an alternative arrangement has caused tremendous losses to the ISPs — about Rs12.5 million a day and at least 6,000 phone calls per day from aggravated customers. The manpower required to answer these phone calls and the revenue generated from them for the PTCL is enormous and unaccounted for to date. “Who is going to pay for all those days when the customers did not turn up?” asks Imran, a frustrated internet café owner in PECHS, who has had virtually no users since June 27.

A customer services executive at Netsol, one of the major ISPs in the country, feels the same way: “So many people have called us in the past few days, asking why the internet isn’t working because, according to the PTCL (and as seen on TV), the problem has been solved. We have to keep telling them not to believe what they see on TV or read in the newspaper. It’s very frustrating for us to answer such calls and then listen to the PTCL say there is no crisis,” he laments.

Since the Pakistani internet market is highly competitive and customer loyalty practically non-existent, such contradictions can seriously discredit an ISP, which in turn, can end up losing a significant proportion of its clients to other companies. And it’s not just the ISPs who have been dealt the short end of the stick.

Several large organizations, such as banks, airline companies, call centres and stock exchanges, are all bearing the brunt of this internet fiasco. Consider, for example, Air Blue, a recently established airline, which is heavily dependent on online ticketing services. About 35 per cent of its business collapsed soon after the blackout. In fact, personnel at the company had to revert to manual ticketing, leading to unavoidable delays and queues at its various offices. In many ways, the crisis has caused irreparable damage to the reputation of countless businesses across the country.

Having said that, one wonders why the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) remains stubbornly mute in the aftermath of this disaster. It is almost as if the PTA has taken a vow of silence on all matters directly related to the PTCL. “Why can’t the PTA take PTCL to task? What is stopping them?” asks Mr Haque and rightly so, for the PTA does have regulatory powers over PTCL. It’s only fair to expect it to investigate the workings of the latter organization, but so far, it has failed to do anything of the sort.

“Didn’t PTA impose a fine on Mobilink, one of the largest cellphone service providers in Pakistan, for it’s sub-standard services? Why can’t it do the same with the PTCL?” It appears that protecting PTCL’s interest is paramount, and hence, the deafening silence on the part of PTA. In fact, not too long ago, the PTA and PTCL had the same chairman.

Though that is not the case now, PTA seems to have stuck to its old habit of acting like PTCL’s faithful bodyguard, much to the chagrin of the ISPs. As the saying goes “some things never change” and not surprisingly the bureaucracy is one of them.

The writer is a member of the Sci-tech World team

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