KARACHI: Internet users in Pakistan experienced slow internet browsing on Saturday and may continue to experience slow speed today as well due to outage in international submarine cable systems IMEWE (India-Middle East-Western Europe), providing internet bandwidth to Pakistan.
Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL), the biggest broadband service provider in Pakistan, said a fault occurred near Jeddah, Saud Arabia in one of the international submarine cable systems IMEWE providing internet bandwidth to Pakistan, early morning Saturday.
Due to this, customers will experience slow internet browsing while another international cable system SEA-ME-WE 4 is already under repair by the international consortium, it added. The Estimated Time to Repair (ETTR) has not been announced as of yet by PTCL.
Chief Business Development Officer PTCL, Sikandar Naqi said that the international consortium managing the submarine cable system has already started working to resolve the situation as early as possible adding “in order to minimize the service impact, PTCL has undertaken necessary measures to arrange additional/alternate bandwidth through its other cable systems and international cable business partners”.
This was not the first-time internet connectivity throughout the country has been affected by cable faults. In fact, it is pretty common and in the past has affected select services as well.
PTCL said that the inconvenience caused to customers is deeply regretted. IMEWE submarine cable is an ultra high capacity fiber optic submarine cable system which links India and Europe via Middle East.
This 3 fiber pair system with total length of approximately 12,091km is complemented with nine terminal stations forming a consortium of nine telecom carriers from eight countries, including PTCL.
PTCL spokesman said arrangements for ad hoc solution have been made and issue will be resolved within next 12 hours while repair will hopefully be done within 48 hours.
PTCL has informed that IMEWE NOC has confirmed that fault is not in the sea and it’s being localised on Saudi land. Once the fault is localised we hope that it would be fixed within 24 to 48 hours InshaAllah. Meanwhile PTCL is in discussion with international carriers for acquiring ad hoc capacity to improve the user experience.