On Friday, 13th of May, a fire at Information Technology Infrastructure’s Karachi Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE) office caused disruption to the city’s Internet connectivity. According to ITI’s helpdesk a fire started at the I.I.Chundrigar exchange was responsible for severing last mile connections to various ISPs and businesses who depend on PIE for their net connectivity. The fire started at 4pm and it took ITI’s personnel about 8 hours to restore connections one-at-a-time to effected customers.
Customers of PIE include ISPs, Data Network Operators (DNOPS), DSL Service providers, software exporters, call centers, educational institutes and corporate businesses.
This is not the first time PTCL’s PIE network has faced problems with reliablity. Tee Emm’s (slightly old) blog provides excellent background on PIE and reliability issues it faced sometime in 2003.
More information needed…I saw Karachi’s WorldCall go down for a while on Friday, my company’s direct connection-through-PTCL was down between 4pm to 11pm as well.
Does anyone have more information on this? Were other ISPs and cities effected by this? I tried searching around but found very little mention of this on the net.
no backup?not sure if they have a failover plan, but they ought to.
IIT and PIE SitesThe official sites are quite useless… none of the links work. It would be nice to have a real time utilization graph of Pakistan’s bandwidth - but it’s probably considered a state secret. There is a link utilization link on the Pakistan Internet Exchange home page, but it doesn’t work.
re: ITI and PIE SitesThe links work for me, though your are right the pages are almost next to useless in terms of content for the regular user.
There is a link to a utilization / latency graph but they require a login/pwd from an authorized PIE person. Can someone drop a password for us ;-)?
Karachi’s WorldCall is downKarachi’s WorldCall is down most of the time, so it’s not indicative of whether PTCL’s link is down.
i hope yoour company is best in the country