KARACHI: In a landmark development, Pakistan has signed an agreement with China to route the East Asian country’s Internet traffic through Pakistan, converting it into a regional connectivity hub and generating about $400 million per annum, the IT minister said on Monday.
Dr. Umar Saif made the announcement as he inaugurated the Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE) in Islamabad on Monday, powered by DE-CIX, an operator of carrier- and data-center-neutral Internet Exchanges, with operations in Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia.
Saif said Pakistan had achieved four important milestones in collaboration with Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd. (PTCL), Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), DE-CIX, Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), China Mobile and PEACE Cable, which stands for Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe, a submarine cable project designed to facilitate data transmission between Asia, Europe, and Africa.
“We have reached an agreement for China to start routing their Internet traffic through Pakistan, making Pakistan a regional hub for connectivity,” Saif said.
In a second development, the minister said UAE state-owned telecommunications company Etisalat had set up Pakistan’s first carrier neutral IXP (Internet Exchange Point) and data center to strengthen the reliability of Internet connectivity.
Thirdly, PTCL would work with DE-CIX to run the operations of the new data center, which would enable Pakistan to both bring super-scaling cloud services such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure to Pakistan and provide a local content hub for content services such as YouTube, TikTok and Netflix, according to Saif.
“And last but not the least, Pakistan’s Internet users can now access services locally and Pakistan can become a hub of regional connectivity.”
Explaining the measures, the IT minister said Pakistan was a massive digital market with an Internet user-base larger than the population of Italy. In recent years, the country had made significant strides in advancing fiber connectivity and multiple submarine cables making a landfall in Karachi.
Now, the PTCL data center, managed by a tier-1 data center operator like DE-CIX, would generate “exciting” prospects for localized content hosting from leading platforms like YouTube, Netflix and TikTok.
Content cached and routed from Pakistan could seamlessly reach other markets, positioning Pakistan as the regional digital connectivity hub, Saif said, and generate annual revenues ranging from $200-400 million through transit traffic to substantially add to the economy.
Owned and managed by Etisalat, PTCL is the largest integrated Information Communication Technology (ICT) company of Pakistan and DE-CIX is the world’s leading Internet Exchange (IX) operator.
Housed in the PTCL data center in Karachi, the IX is operated by DE-CIX under the DE-CIX as a Service (DaaS) model and built on DE-CIX’s award-winning interconnection infrastructure.
The interconnection platform offers local peering as well as remote access to DE-CIX Frankfurt (Germany).
Zarrar Hasham Khan, Group Chief Business Solutions Officer at PTCL & Ufone 4G, said the company’s nationwide network and DE-CIX’s interconnection infrastructure would serve as a foundation to enhance the Internet experience of customers while facilitating the local hosting of content by international platforms.
Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX, said as one of the most populous countries in Asia and with Internet usage growing extremely fast, Pakistan needed local interconnection.
“The Pakistan Internet Exchange powered by DE-CIX will prove itself to be key to unlocking the economic potential of excellent Internet connectivity for the country,” he added.
The Pakistan Internet Exchange will be joining such success stories as the UAE-IX, powered by DE-CIX in Dubai, whose growth and success over the last twelve years have led to it being recognized as an important international Internet hub.
