Under Sea Cable Cut Slows Down Internet Across Pakistan

smw4SMW4, one of the four undersea internet cables that connects Pakistan to rest of the world, has been damaged in the segment 4 beyond Egypt for currently unknown reasons, impacting the internet speeds for majority of internet users with-in Pakistan.

This is second undersea cable that got damaged in parallel, resulting into serious browsing issues for Pakistani internet users.

The Estimated Time To Repair (ETTR) has not been announced as of yet, as PTCL and Transworld, the two lessee’s of the cable for Pakistan are in communication with SEAMEWE-4 consortium members to determine the time it will take to repair the cable.

Internet service providers estimates that around 40% of customers may experience slow browsing.

ISPs said that majority of internet traffic is already shifted to SMW3.

It merits mentioning here that other undersea backhaul data and voice cables namely IMEWE and EIG are also being repaired as they were damaged earlier this month.

South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) is an optical fibre submarine communications cable system that carries telecommunications between Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France.

The cable is approximately 18,800 kilometres long, and provides the primary Internet backbone between South East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe.


  • Inspite of this matter PTCL has always lame excuses. Don’t know when they are going to fix this shit.

  • Internet speed at my office sucked big time. However my residence internet connection is working flawlessly

  • my internet speed is not affected… received round 250 to 300kb/s on my 2mb connection…

  • No doubt we all need Internet with good speed but unfortunately
    the companies who earn trough internet (Call Centers, Web hosting, online trading etc) are facing
    very tough time and almost losing out their business because of this sad accident.

    Let us pray that the problem we are facing would be fixed shortly.

  • Hi,
    i’m IT Consultant and my job relies totally oninternet just like many other people here. i think we should not blame any isp here because i believe they are trying there best to provide internet. As for ptcl if you try to ping google.com.pk you will notice latency around 400ms and some time even tumeouts. so you shall atleast thank to isp if thy are giving you slow internet through some backup channel. hopefully this issue would be resolved by Monday InshaAllah otherwise our IT industry would suffer alot.

    regards,
    Ammar Ahmed Khan


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