One of Pakistan’s main pipes to the global internet, the SEAMEWE-3 cable developed a fault on Monday at about 9pm Pakistan standard time. As of 11:30pm engineering at ITI informed me that the relevant parties were still trying to locate the fault, and there was no ETA on the fix. The fault has caused major data congestion on the few backup satellite uplinks Pakistan has to the outside world resulting in extremely slow to no connectivity in the entire region.
Update 12:38am: Seems like this is problem is not localized to Pakistan, it is also affecting India and Singapore’s bandwidth (and possibly everyone else who depends on SEAMEWE-3). ITI informs me that the SEAMEWE consortium is investigating this issue. Also – SEAMEWE-3 is Pakistan’s main pipe to the global internet.
Update 8:22am: Still no word on what the problem is or the ETA for the fix. All ITI says (or knows) is that work in on-going to fix the fault. They continue to work off backup satellites. Connection speed early morning (4am - 6am) was decent (60kbytes/sec on a 1mbs direct ITI link), presumably because of off peak hours. At the time of writing the 1mbs link is transferring at about 10kbytes/sec or about 10% of its capacity. It will probably get worse as the country wakes up and starts hitting the net.
Update 9:21am (Wednesday): Just spoke to an engineer in Islamabad (some guy from ITI Karachi gave me the number). The cable has not been repaired yet and Pakistan is still working off backup satellites. Apparently the repair crew is ready to fix cable fault, but has not received the green signal by all the countries who’s bandwidth will be effected by the repair operation (mostly countries in Asia and some in Europe). This story is also being covered on Slashdot as well as other sources .
Another interesting issue - Air Blue, a Pakistani airline carrier says that the fault has caused huge losses for them because they depend on their online reservation system for most of their business.
Corrected: It is SEAMEWE-3 cable that developed the fault, not SME-3.
Update 11:27pm (Wednesday): Just spoke to an engineer at ITI again. He confirmed what the local media is saying about repairs taking atleast 4-5 days and even as long as week. According to him, the repair crew has not reached the site yet, once they do they will need to physically trace the cable along the seabed and see what kind of damage has been done to it. Meanwhile, 3 backup E3 connections (one E3 connection is 33mbp/s I am told) have been deployed to cope with the bandwidth, though that doesn’t even meet half the bandwidth requirements of the Karachi at offpeak hours.