LAHORE, July 8: The countrywide breakdown of Internet on Monday night cost the service providers (ISPs) over Rs5 million and the dependent businesses at least 10 times that much.

According to ISP sources, the breakdown that lasted for around 17 hours — from 2pm on Monday to 7am on Tuesday — snapped the country’s cyber-connection with the rest of the world. The submarine cable of Pakistan TeleCommunication Company (PTCL) developed some fault due to power fluctuation, which could not be removed in time because of heavy rain.

“The situation was due to PTCL monopoly over the business,” said one of the ISP owners. Resilience to faults has never been a hallmark of government-run organizations, and the PTCL is no exception. The government must learn from Monday’s breakdown and loosen PTCL’s hold over the business. It must allow the industry to develop alternative means for getting Internet signals, he maintained.

At present, the government has a monopoly over Internet signals over a certain bandwidth that it passes over to the ISPs.

Another ISP owner lamented that the PTCL had persistently refused to sign a service-level agreement (SLA) with the ISPs which would include penalties for such breakdowns. The industry had approached the ministry and was given the deadline of May 30 for the agreement, but the PTCL avoided it. An SLA is the only way to force the PTCL to develop alternatives for emergencies, he maintained.

“It was the most unfortunate time for such a major breakdown to occur because the government was offering the PTCL for privatization,” said an official of the company. He insisted that the company was trying to cope with an aging system, had improved the system and was able to contain the damages when hackers attacked it. The Monday’s breakdown was a wakeup call and the company would do whatever was needed, he hoped.

“ISPs were flooded with complaints due to the breakdown,” said an employee of one of the biggest ISPs in the city. The corporate world could do without browsing for a few hours but not without e-mail. This is precisely what happened on Tuesday — no e-mail meant no business and a lot of pressure on ISPs.

The ISPs suffered a loss of around Rs5 million, but the loss to businesses dependent on the Internet was at least 10 times more as linkages among all stock exchanges, B2B and electronic mail broke down.

Meanwhile, according to a PTCL press release on Tuesday, the Internet capacity of the submarine cable became inoperational due to a power problem at the Karachi terminal of SME system. The only backup, satellite connectivity, was also not available due to heavy rain and strong winds.