Internet down again in Pakistan

[Kursed]

ISLAMABAD: The solitary submarine Internet cable connecting Pakistan with the rest of the world went down again at around 11 pm on Saturday.

Although the Internet traffic had been suffering serious intermittent slowdowns, the country’s Internet-dependent community including the newspaper industry went into darkness.

Senior PTCL official Mashkoor Hussain confirmed to The News on telephone that the country was not connected to the world through fibre optic cable. He said the entire traffic would be shifted to 240 MB satellite backup.

"According to my information, the Sea-Me-We 3 (South East Asia Middle East Western Europe 3) is down from Djibouti to Mumbai including Fujarah and Karachi," Mashkoor said.

The fresh outage follows a recent severe blow to the country when the breakdown of SMW 3 lasted for 10 days and eight hours (June 27 to July 8). The 39,000-kilometre-long fibre optic link, run by a 92-party consortium, had developed the fault 52 nautical miles (some 96 kilometres) off the coast of Karachi due to a power breakdown.

The SEA-ME-WE 3 is a fibre optic cable laid on the seabed by a company FLAG and in case of disconnection or rupture, the failure may take some two weeks to be fixed.

The country’s Internet traffic, particularly the Call Centers, Long Distance Operators and other important businesses, would be moved to the backup Satellite bandwidth.

Mashkoor could not give any reason for the interruption. "The cause behind this blackout cannot be determined right now," he said.

Farrukh Aslam, a top office-bearer of call centers’ association working closely with ISPAK, said, "The PTCL has still not learnt any lesson from their historic blunders."

The IT&T ministry has repeatedly directed them to arrange 50 per cent back-up bandwidth on the satellite, but today the country would be relying on some 25 per cent bandwidth on the satellite, he said. PTCL President Junaid could not be contacted.

source: Jang

[|BloodBath|]

[Amar aka AM@Z]

240 MB backup ? i dont get it ? is it like a download limit or something ..... ? cuz i got serious torrents downloading man,

P.s : ONLY IN PAKISTAN

[Kursed]

I guess he meant 240MBps downlink bandwidth via satellites.

[OptiKNerV]

Oh not again !

[B[oO]tY]

i prefer to say MEOW BIYATCHES!

[scatter]

yaar. wotta bad.

[Trekker]

net is sooooooooooooo slow

[Cr0c0_DuCk]

weheeeeeeee net was MUCKED up again .... party hats any1?

[Cateye]

my net working fine .... as usual

[Thyhammerr]

net is slow .. but the damn download breaks..

Wonders of MIRC Download :/

Thank You,
Thyhammerr

[hazzman]

w00t dubai is safe this time! w00t!

[ToRPeDo]

surprisingly from morning i have download more than 200 mb in 10 hours, at speed of around 6kb, compared to 200mb yesterday in 15 hours, i say net is working very good, when its through satellites.

[Kursed]

The rest can do a trace route to know whether their ISP is still routed through FLAG or they have been re-routed to the satellite backup bandwidth..