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Still no relief for ISPs and LDIs from PTC

Dawn reports two meetings between PTCL, Ministry of IT and industry ISPs have ended without resolution. ISPs and LDIs are demanding $43m compensation for the outages in the form of free internet bandwidth for 40 days. PTCL is only settling on 10 days.

The outage itself was much longer than 10 days. Second, a single days outage simply cannot be compensated by a single day’s worth of free bandwidth since losses from a one-day outage are more far reaching than just the lost bandwidth.

PTCL is still sticking to its guns, saying they are not under any obligation to compensate for the outage. The ISPs, however, may still be liable to their customers who deserve compensation for the outage. The ISPs claim they should recieve 4 days for every free day given to customers since the bandwidth ~25% of the operating costs (others being salaries, rental, collocation, marketing etc).

Is your ISP compensating you? Should ISPs be compensated or should this simply be considered the cost of doing business in Pakistan and taken away from their profit margins as an operating expense?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Internet, Legal, Telecom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Still no relief for ISPs and LDIs from PTC”

  1. haq says:
    August 6, 2005 at 4:50 pm

    ironicIronically, Etisalat’s SEAMEWE links have also been down for the past 4 days for almost the same reason. From http://www.ameinfo.com/65291.html on Aug 3rd:

    Internet traffic in the UAE is being affected after a submarine cable linking Mumbai and Penang was cut yesterday, taking out four of Etisalat’s 19 links. E-Company marketing manager Farooq Hasan said broadband customers who use the net for gaming and peer-to-peer applications will be most affected. No indication was given as to when the problem would be rectified.

    They did however plan for such an occasion. From an end user’s point of view — residential lines are slow but usuable for light web browsing. Interestingly some sites are lighting fast to load up, like google, while some others you’ll have to hit reload a few times to get to. I guess it is the mirroring factor. Messenger was usuable on and off and things have steadly improved as they bring even more backup links online. I can’t confirm this, but I believe bussiness links / leased lines seem to have been give priority over the bandiwdth from the start.