The satellite bandwidth provided to Internet services providers(ISPs) is totally insufficient to cater to the country's growing virtual traffic.
Sources in Internet services told Business Recorder on Tuesday that during the outage of September 24 (Saturday), the worst fear of ISPs was a sudden relapse of the problem as the cause of the most recent failure has not been discovered or intimated.
They said: "In our country, there is no concept of critical infrastructure and alternative Internet readiness and this is also coupled with no risk models associated with this infrastructure."
He said: "Unfortunately, we do not have in-line backup systems to provide redundancy to this infrastructure. It is for this reason that we will remain relegated to a third-tier status in the information technology (IT) world. In terms of quality of resources, cost of business is the single most important element for foreign clients.
"The capital expenditure for V-SATs [satellite backup], 50 KVA backup power generation units, redundant Internet connections, loss of time and productivity through outages--all such factors have a direct negative impact on our competitiveness."
During last week, on September 24, an undersea cable connecting Karachi and Mumbai with the West developrd some fault and failed around 10:30 pm. The cable fault blocked 75 percent of country's Internet connectivity to the outside world and some voice traffic.
The service was restored at about 1.30 am the next day, but has left the dependent industry in the region full of anxiety, especially in Pakistan.
During the outage, Internet and call centres traffic in the country was shifted to 240 MB satellite backup facilities which give priority to call centres in the country serving their United States and United Kingdom based clients.
According to call centres, the outage did not result in any loss of service or latency problems when it switched over to a satellite connection.
They said that their voice services to the United States had also shifted over smoothly to satellite backup systems, but it hurt Internet users who do not have alternative backup arrangements.
The economic impact: consumers in the country were reportedly hit hard by the outage, along with high-tech firms that do not qualify for preferential satellite backup links. Due to weekend, Saturday night is a time of heavy Internet use in the country.
In may be recalled that the last major outage of submarine cable Southeast Asia, Middle East and Western Europe-3 (SEA-ME-WE3) caused a major blackout and the country remained disconnected from the outside world for 10 days and 8 hours (June 27 to July 8).
Additional disruptions from the most recent outage were reported in Djibouti, where the recent cable fault reportedly originated.
The virtual traffic to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman was also disrupted, because those countries are part of the five-nation system linked by the submarine cable network.