KARACHI, July 6: A fault was detected in the country’s only fibre-optic link when engineers pulled up the defective portion of the cable from under the seabed and carried out technical tests on Wednesday.

Internet connections and other telecommunication links of the country snapped on the night of June 27 when the 39,000-kilometre-long fibre-optic cable broke down near Karachi.

“A two-kilometre-long piece of the fibre-optic cable was pulled up and subjected to a number of technical tests, which showed that there was only one fault in the cable. Engineers would take at least two days to reconnect the severed portion of the cable with the main fibre-optic link,” said the Senior Executive Vice-President of the Pakistan Telecommunication Company, Mashkoor Hussain.

He declined to say what had caused the cable to break down.

When asked why the area under which the cable lay had not been declared out of bounds for ships and boats, he said: “Nowhere in the world the area over a cable is blocked to navigational traffic. Besides, it is the first fault in six years. If SEAMEWE-4 had become operational, people would not have felt the impact of the breakdown of this cable so intensely.”

He said that at present Pakistan had 272MB of bandwidth from the satellite Intersat.