Internet services across Pakistan is facing disruption since evening today as the technical fault develops in the most important 25,000 km long submarine cable connecting Asia-Europe AAE1. The overall speed of the internet has gone down as the 40Terabyte cable broke near Fujairah. Internet data traffic has been shifted at the other low-capacity alternate cable.
Repairing a 40 terabyte cable is likely to take several days. AAE1 transmits a significant amount of Pakistan’s internet traffic which covers over half of Pakistan’s international bandwidth requirements.
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“Internet services are impacted and you may face some service degradation due to technical fault in the International Submarine Cable AAE-1 at Fujairah. PTCL in conjunction with the International Submarine Consortium is working to fully restore internet services across the country. We regret the inconvenience caused to our customers and will notify you as soon as the services are fully restored. Thank you for your patience.”
This requires the installation of more underwater cables in Pakistan in order to provide redundancy for the country’s growing internet sector.
The Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1) submarine cable connects Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Yemen, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and France across a distance of 25,000 kilometres.
On January 27, 2014, the AAE-1 consortium signed a construction and maintenance agreement in Hong Kong, and the AAE-1 cable system was opened for commercial use in June 2017.
The AAE-1 cable system uses 100Gbps technology and has a trunk capacity of more than 40 Tbps over five fibre pairs.
