Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) has notified to all Internet service providers (ISPs) and call centres regarding closing down of two STM-I links for seven days due to maintenance in submarine cable SEA-ME-WE-3. In a letter to the ISPs, the phone utility said that this had been necessitated for routine maintenance of a segment of the cable between Portuguese city Seisenbra and Penchmarh of France.
Sources told Business Recorder on Monday that this would no doubt cause another serious congestion to be faced by the Internet traffic and the stakeholders, including ISPs, call centres, airlines, travel companies and other traffic, especially in the voice traffic routing over Internet.
The PTCL has to re-route the Internet traffic, as, if the phone utility again opted for satellite diversion, it would be catastrophic for call centres and information technology-enabled services in the country.
Sources said that PTCL would be closing down 2 of the 5 STM-I for a scheduled maintenance of British Telecom and United States based Sprint starting from July 18 for a period of seven days.
Sources said, "We strongly urge the phone utility (PTCL) to make all efforts to re-route these two STM-Is of British Telecom and Sprint via several routes available in Europe. Without going into the absurd question of 'restorable and non-restorable' make this shortfall of two STM-I (310Mb) transparent to the users, more so in view of the losses and shock suffered by the users for last 12 days."