The breakdown of the Internet system due to a fault in the PTCL's submarine cable, South, East Asia Middle East, Western Europe-3 (SEA-ME-WE-3), has thoroughly exposed the system's vulnerability and done considerable damage to the country's image and its nascent service industry in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).
The fault, which occurred in the evening of June 27, has remained in a state of disrepair for over a week. As a report in this paper pointed out, this is the fourth incident of a major fault in two years' time, and it has almost completely disrupted the country's Internet connectivity with the outside world.
When the system last failed on July 7, 2003, our telephony and Internet monopoly, PTCL, had proved itself to be so ill-prepared to meet an emergency situation that it had to airlift, all the way from France, such basic paraphernalia as a power supply equipment to repair the damaged submarine cable.
This time, until a week after the cable developed a problem, the company had yet to establish as to what had gone wrong with it. Admittedly, the PTCL did make an alternative arrangement, via satellite, for the restoration of Internet links, which brought relief to banks, airlines and the stock exchanges.
However, the backup facility has proven to be far short of the requirement. The shared bandwidth that has been offered to the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is only of 2.7 MB in terms of virtual access as compared to 171mb that the Pakistan Internet Exchange received before the submarine cable went out of operation.
For the burgeoning international call centres in the BPO field that meant only 20 percent connectivity, and hence an extremely hamstrung ability to work. Faced with the choice of offering poor quality service or no service at all, many of these centres have announced work suspensions, and, resultantly, substantial lay-offs. Several of them say they have lost new contracts. Clearly, the breakdown has come as a big setback for Pakistan's chances to emerge as a serious competitor in the BPO field.
Over all, ten million Internet subscribers are reported to have suffered problems of one or another kind. The ISPs are rightly complaining that even though their service is dependent on the PTCL, they are the ones who get blamed by the consumers for offering poor service. The situation calls for a rethink of the government policy to maintain PTCL monopoly over primary the Internet service.
After its recent privatisation the entity is expected to overhaul its infrastructure and improve its ability to deal with emergencies like the present one. Still, the government must also give due consideration to the ISPs' demand for the establishment of multiple gateways in the private sector. That would, needless to say, open up the field to competition and consequently effective alternatives for an uninterrupted Internet connectivity.