Faulty submarine cable slows Internet speed across Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: Internet speed slowed down across Pakistan after a submarine cable cut degraded broadband services in the South Asian nation late Monday, the Pakistani telecom regulator said. 
The fault was reported at a distance of around 400 kilometers off the coast of Pakistan toward the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman, Geo News reported. 
“A cable cut has been reported in TransWorld (TW1) submarine cable system at about 6pm on Monday,” the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said in a statement. 
It said the fault had caused an outage of international bandwidth and might result in degradation of services for Transworld bandwidth users. 
“The consortium is arranging adhoc bandwidth to minimize the impact. Efforts are going on to ascertain exact location of the fault and expected restoration time,” the PTA said. 
In October last year, an AAE-1 submarine cable fault near Fujairah also caused disruption in Internet services across Pakistan. The AAE-1 is one of the six international submarine cables landing in Pakistan. 
Pakistan has 110 million broadband subscriptions, according to the PTA.