We have heard of electrical outages and have often heard of no water supply, but this week we add another item to the list, NO INTERNET ACCESS. On Monday afternoon the SMW-2 cable suffered a critical power loss about 30 odd miles from Karachi, to make matters worse PTCL sadly tried to save up money and signed with an inferior company instead of the original contractors SingTel and hence the repair ship was now located a days sail in Dubai. Rumors have it that things would be fixed by Saturday.
We all know problems can occur with any mechanical device but when critical national issues are concerned there should be a exceptional back-up plan not a measly 34Mb Satellite uplink for the entire Pakistan. Internet technology is now also of national importance as numerous tax-paying revenue generating companies depend on it solely to normally funciton. Sadly it is not the first time the SMW cable has gone down and the industry has repeatedly complained to the PTA to shape up. Unfortunately PTA enforces a PTCL monoploy where it gives them a free hand to exhorbitantly charge 300-400 times the actual cost.
The computer industry has suffered a tremendous heart attack with this outage, and if damages were totalled would result in losses to the tune of a couple million dollars if not more. Damages would just not end there as investor confidence would also plumet surely a perfect scenario where India stands to gain from this govt. orchestrated disaster. Someone better wake-up and beat these shit holes into shape its about time we start to compete with India and China on at least a level playing atleast on the Internet. Pakistan Internet is down for the count 1-2-3-4-5…… (Lets hope it stops here).
Comments
4 responses to “Knocked Out”
couple of million dollars? 10 days of limited internet access means a lot more than that, not to mention the harm done to the tech industry in international eyes by this one incident. All the conferences, speeches etc. our ministers have ever done in the last 10 years are nullified by this.
tsk tsk. i dont think the government is sincere. i guess the whole world will have adsl+2 and we will be still stuck with an inferior infrastructure. i guess the day they clean up their act is the day hell freezes over.
Good thing I have exams and can’t spend that much time online nowadays anyways, otherwise I would be even more pissed than I am! Having one single cable for 10 million Internet users seems too stupid to be true.
I guess its our desi way not to see the problem until its completely shoved into our face–now after this disaster the people at PTCL are saying “Hmm, hey Abdul, would this have happened if we had a second line as backup?” and his loyal assistant is like “Hmm, probably not Boss, but still, we didn’t make a mistake, we always did what’s best.” 🙂
this sucks. i havent seen any of my friends online since some time. when will they restore the fibre optic link.