ISLAMABAD: The internet disruption caused by a fault in one of the submarine cables landing in Pakistan has been “largely” restored, the IT minister confirmed on Saturday.
The Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) cable, one of the seven internet cables connecting Pakistan, developed a fault near Qatar on Thursday, causing a bandwidth shortage of at least one terabit per second (tbps) in the country.
In a media briefing, Shaza Fatima Khawaja stated that around 80 percent of the bandwidth shortfall caused by the fault has been recovered. This was achieved by shifting AAE-1 traffic to two other cables — SEA-ME-WE 4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4) and IMEWE (India-Middle East-Western Europe). All three cables are managed by the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd (PTCL).
The complete traffic from the damaged cable could not be shifted to the other two lines due to their lack of additional capacity. Internet cables typically operate at 40-50% of their total capacity to reserve space for shifting data in case of damage to other cables.
Around 1.8 terabits per second of data has been shifted to the IMEWE cable system, while 1.5 tbps was moved to the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable.
The fault in the AAE-1 cable occurred on Thursday, but the process of rerouting traffic was delayed due to manpower shortages during the New Year holidays.
The AAE-1 cable, which began operations in 2017, connects Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Pakistan, India, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and France.
According to PTA officials, a new challenge for PTCL is that the full capacity of IMEWE and SEA-ME-WE 4 has now been utilized. “These two cable systems were operating at around 60% capacity due to rising internet demand in the country. PTCL has now requested the international partners of these systems to activate additional capacity for Pakistan,” an official told Dawn.
The ad-hoc arrangements are taking longer due to holidays and other logistical issues.
The fault is unlikely to be fixed soon, as submarine cable repairs can take several months. The previous fault in the AAE-1 cable, which occurred in Pakistani territorial waters in 2021, took almost 45 days to repair. Repairs on such cables can take anywhere from 20 days to four months, depending on terrain and weather conditions.
