PTA says submarine cable fault fixed as internet services return to normal

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said on Friday that internet services across the country had returned to normal after a fault in the SEA-ME-WE 5 international submarine cable system was resolved.

In a statement, the regulator said the disruption in the cable network had caused widespread connectivity problems on Thursday night, but added that the issue had now been addressed and internet traffic had normalized. The PTA also said that Transworld Associates’ international transit capacity had been restored.

According to information available on Transworld Associates’ website, the company is the only private-sector operator with exclusive ownership of submarine fibre-optic cable systems. Following the restoration, internet service provider Nayatel also said international traffic had returned to normal and that its teams were continuing to monitor the network for service stability.

On Thursday night, the PTA had said that a technical problem along the SEA-ME-WE 5 route was affecting data traffic. At the time, the authority had warned that "some internet users may experience intermittent degradation in service quality and connectivity as a result of the fault."

New cable landed in Pakistan last year

In November, the South-East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 6 submarine cable landed in Pakistan. The Ministry of Information Technology said at the time that the new cable had a total capacity of more than 100 terabit per second and would provide one of the lowest-latency routes linking Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe.

The ministry said Pakistan had been allocated a total of 13.2tbps on the new system. It also said SEA-ME-WE 6 includes more fibre pairs and more than double the capacity of earlier SEA-ME-WE systems, improving resilience and route diversification on busy Asia-Europe connections through trans-Egypt geo-diversified crossings and landing points.