Internet speed across Pakistan plummeted by nearly 60 per cent on Monday when an underwater fiber optic cable was damaged in the Arabian Sea near Karachi.
The damage mainly affected Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) and its sister company Ufone are down in various parts of Pakistan.
Services for both the companies are reportedly down in parts of Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and other cities.
PTCL, in a Facebook post, confirmed that its services were impacted and they were working to restore them.
We are currently facing major outage on our network due to which internet service to some of our customers is impacted. #PTCL
— PTCL (@PTCLOfficial) December 26, 2016
(1 of 2)
We are currently facing major outage on our network due to which internet service to some of our customers is impacted. #PTCL
— PTCL (@PTCLOfficial) December 26, 2016
(1 of 2)
However, the internet service providers were unable to provide a timeframe on when the problem will be resolved.
Earlier, some social media users came up with reports that they got automated calls from PTCL, informing them about a planned upgradation activity on Monday.
PTCL landline, DSL, Ufone cellular services have completely vanished for users across country. Exact count of impacted users or areas is still not known.
Pakistan Telecommunications Company Limited (PTCL) act as the internet gateway to Pakistan and provide bandwidth to local internet service providers. TWA and PTCL are connected with four undersea fiber optic cables that include I-ME-WE, SEA-ME-WE-3, SEA-ME-WE-4 and TWA-1.
The country’s internet traffic is currently running on SEA-ME-WE-3and TWA-1 and catering to the entire telecommunications traffic.
SEA-ME-WE 4 provides a telecommunications link between Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France.
The cable is approximately 18,800 kilometres long, and provides the primary internet backbone between South East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe.
