Internet Speeds in Pakistan Badly Affected Due to Fault in Submarine Cable

From 1st Ramadan (June 19, 2015), almost everyone in Pakistan is facing the major dropdown in browsing and downloading speeds. Almost whole of Pakistan — including 3G users — are impacted with slow internet speeds due to a fault that is developed in SEAMEWE4, one of the the major submarine cables that connect Pakistan with rest of the internet.

Sources at PTCL — which relies heavily on SEAMEWE4 — confirmed the issue and said that since the time taken for restoration of SEAMEWE4 is taking longer than they had earlier thought, bandwidth is now being shifted to other submarine cables to make sure that country’s demands are met adequately.

One of our Submarine Cables (SMW4) has developed a fault. Location has been identified and team is working on restoring the connectivity.

— PTCL Cares (@PTCLCares) June 24, 2015

Sources said that complete restoration of SEAMEWE4 could take a couple of weeks, and until then the bandwidth reliance on back-up submarine cables will be enhanced. During this, internet users may face degraded download/upload speeds.

Latency rates are going to remain high during this window, while pages may not load at all. Reloading of the pages is advised, while unnecessary high-rate data consumption is also not recommended.

UPDATE:

IMEWE cable has also been damaged to add up more problems for ISPs in arranging backup bandwidth.

• New IMEWE Outage: 110 Gbps
• Ongoing SMW4 Outage: 178 Gbps
• Total Unavailable Bandwidth: 288 Gbps

Pakistan has a total of 360 Gbps bandwidth, out of which only 72 Gbps is available right now.

ISPs are in the process of rerouting bandwidth but it will take time (a few hours at the very minimum). After this new development, it’s going to be a few days before normal service is resumed.

Courtesy: Propakistani