Internet services restored across country
KARACHI: Internet services in Pakistan have been restored after being affected for almost two days due to damage to the underwater submarine cable, said Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited’s Imran Janjua on Sunday.
“The fault was located on land in Jeddah at 3:00am on Friday and had affected the entire east side of the India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) submarine cable,” said the PTCL general manager while talking to Dawn.
He explained that this was an international fault as internet services in Pakistan, India and UAE were affected.
The IMEWE submarine cable is an ultra-high capacity fibre optic undersea cable system which links the subcontinent and Europe via the Middle East.
26 domestic, international flights delayed over the weekend due to internet disruptions
According to Mr Janjua, Pakistan suffered more as two other submarine cables – SEA-ME-WE 4 and Transworld – are still being fixed after they were damaged in July.
He said that PTCL had invested in four international cable systems (SMW-3, SMW-4, IMEWE and AAE-1).
“Considering the constant requirement of additional bandwidth and to give seamless services to our customers, PTCL is now investing in another cable which will be operational in 2018 and the landing part of that cable will be in Gwadar,” he added.
Flight delays
According to the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), at least 26 domestic and international flights were delayed over the weekend due to the internet disruptions. “We made alternate arrangements later and everything is back on track,” said PIA Spokesperson Mashood Tajwar, adding that PIA’s reservation systems were functioning normally and flights were back on schedule on Sunday.
He explained that after the fault in the submarine cable in Jeddah, PIA managed to transfer their system to Transworld and PIE — which are used as back-ups in such situations — and as a consequence there were some delays.
“For most of Sunday, PIA’s main source had not been restored and we were running on our back-up system but it is up and running on the PTCL system now,” he said.
“Two international PIA flights — one to Toronto, Canada and another to London, UK — were delayed because of a technical problem in the security scanning machine at Jinnah International Airport in Karachi not because of the internet situation,” added Mr Tajwar.
Some of the flights delayed on Saturday were PK-296 Lahore-Rahim Yar Khan, PK 301 Islamabad-Karachi, PK-302 Karachi-Lahore, PK-651 Islamabad-Lahore, PK-203 Lahore-Dubai, PK-716 Medina-Multan, PK-764 Jeddah-Faisalabad, PK762 Jeddah-Karachi, PK-279 Sialkot- Salalah, PK-368 Karachi-Islamabad and PK-754 Riyadh-Islamabad.
Two flights of national flag carrier, one for Islamabad to Barcelona PK-769, was delayed for more than an hour and another one for London PK-785 was delayed for 45 minutes.
Uninterrupted connections
According to the National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC), their subscribers continued to enjoy uninterrupted high-speed internet services despite a fault in submarine cable.
On Sunday, Managing Director of the NTC, retired Brig Viqar Rashid Khan, said when most of the correspondence has been shifted on the internet, no organisation small or big could afford absence from cyber space for even small fraction of time.
“For government organisations cyber absence may result in huge irreparable loss. Realising the importance of steady internet and other ICT services NTC arranged alternate means of communication,” he added while talking to APP.
Published in Dawn, August 7th, 2017