Internet speeds in Pakistan to reduce significantly in next few days

Internet users in Pakistan will experience slow Internet and disrupted connectivity due to a fault in one of the most important submarine cable – SEAMEWE4. The physical fault, which occurred near Karachi, has been identified and it will take a couple of weeks for complete restoration of the Internet in Pakistan. Meanwhile, bandwidth is being shifted to other cables in order to avoid any further inconvenience to the users.

Due to the physical fault, the bandwidth at the cables was not restored. According to a recent update from PTCL Cares on Twitter, bandwidth availability has been improved via shifting the load on the other cables but it will take 1-2 days to optimize the Internet speeds for the users. Currently, all Pakistanis are provided bandwidth from a portion which is about 5 times less than the original bandwidth allocated to Pakistan.

The following image shows the fault location near Karachi on the map for the undersea Internet cable – SEAMEWE4.

We tested out Internet speed at our end using PTCL speed test tool. The below images show the results of the test in Islamabad, and Lahore respectively. Internet speeds in Islamabad seem to be more prone to delays than in Lahore considering the difference in Jitter values. The download speeds are better in Islamabad than in Lahore, but it is opposite for upload speeds.

The tests below are conducted to show the impact of the fault on the Internet speed within the country. As pointed out earlier, the overall bandwidth allocated to Pakistan has been reduced to about five times. This means that Internet users within Pakistan have been re-allocated bandwidths without any optimization yet. Because of low bandwidth allocation, networks within Pakistan can experience bottleneck at peak times of the day.