Internet Link Restored

Almost two weeks after the undersea cable problem that crippled the country’s international bandwidth, things are back in full swing. The issue was resolved sometime Friday morning and the link was fully operational (after testing) by noon the same day.

It’s hard to say how much losses businesses have suffered during this period. A lot of businesses, based entirely or mostly on the net, have sprung up recently. Call centers, airlines and banks rely on it quite heavily and even the provided satellite backups could hardly provide half of the required bandwidth.

Nadir Minhas, my ex-boss and a good friend of mine and the owner of a classy broadband cafe here in Islamabad, was mentioned in this Yahoo News article which states how badly his business suffered:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/050630/481/isl10106301407

Though we’re used to frequent local outages (due to power failures, faulty lines etc.) that cause at most a few hours of disruptance, it is the first time I’ve seen it on this scale and for this long. As I said earlier, it would take a failure like this before better redundancy is provided. Now, at least two backup links are being setup, another undersea link and one over land through India.

I hope this doesn’t cause too much of a setback for the booming industries here. It looks like it might have been for the better in the long run because of the backup links coming up. Might also lower the costs enough for people like me to afford unlimited data transfers. Something I dearly miss these days.