For about 3.5 hours today, almost half of the Internet in Pakistan was down. Renesys observed 46% of the routed networks of Pakistan withdrawn from the global routing table between 19:37 and 23:02 UTC making this the largest Internet outage we have observed in the country in recent years.
All 1253 networks involved in the outage were routed through Transworld Associates (AS38193), suggesting the outage was likely the result of a problem on the Transworld network serving Pakistan (TW1).
At the time of this writing, these networks have been restored.
So.. pakistan did just issue this mandate to ISPs in region:
"Block this list of 150k objectionable sites"
http://digitalrightswatch.org/?p=11333
There was a terrestrial optical fiber cable dual cut between TW cable landing station and the rest of the network. The outage lasted 3.5 hours approx. TW thru its TW1 cable carries almost half of Pakistan's total 30 GB of international transit Internet traffic. The other half is carried by PTCL thru its SMW3 and SMW4 cable system capacities.
I would be interested to know if you have witnessed any outages in Thailand during the flooding.
PTCL IP Transit network is many times larger than TW1. Secondly TW isn't carrying 30G nor they have half of international IP Traffic of Pakistan....So plz don't mislead people
Mubashir, since you are contradicting Tariq's statement, please regale us by highlighting total IP Transit consumption of Pakistan and PTCL's lion's share.
In Tbps!
Figures (in numbers - either Tbps and Gigs) on both Pakistan and PTCL's IP consumption would be more appropriate to mention here.
PTCL traffic isn't also in Tbps nor even closer to it, get a correct figure please.
TW is carrying major corporate traffic of the region unlike ptcl whose 80% traffic comprises of their own broadband users.
PTCL ip transit bandwidth at the moment is close to 73Gbps with traffic touching around 55 Gbps at peak time.
Please note that PTCL has lost all the share in large corporate sector. None of the heavyweights trust PTCL for routing their traffic instead all major players are connected to TW making it 54% of the market share in this area. PTCL's poor performance in quality has led to a change for many in the mid corporate sector as well and gradually TW is making its mark once it does, PTCL would need to rethink its investment in 3 cable systems.
We have had PTCL connection now for almost 2 years and logically we are disconnected since inception and if we face a problem with our connection an average resolution takes 25 days to come through which ridiculates business rules even in remote setups like Congo turnaround times don't exceed more than 4 days but PTCL in Pakistan has broken all records. If you're using PTCL; then congratulations for being part of PTCL while it makes history by breaking all the previous crap-service records.
PTCL has deeper pockets than TW1. The initial TW1 contracts with International carriers were done at extremely high rates and the prices were frozen in the contract till some time which really hurt TW1.
TW1 also does not own the last mile. It's national infrastructure is also not owned by it - Multinet and Mobilink networks are used.
TW1 does not have multiple cable systems. Now, these are facts whether one likes it or not.
PTCL on the other hand, owns everything. It has its own redundant fiber optic network as well as the last mile. We can say that PTCL has not been able to successfuly target the Corporate market but PTCL has been working on that.
PTCL's 4Mbps connection has been running flawlessly in my office with IPTV since almost six months. No internet outages have been there although on heavy downloads, ZTE ONU's cannot shape traffic properly, thereby affecting video quality.
Masud, I don't know whether you've ever been outside Pakistan but outsourcing models work the best. To a small player like you it may sound interesting that your provider owns the long haul however note that that is just 1 national long haul they own; whereas TW1 has outsourced long hauls to 3 parties making it 3x powerful then PTCL. You need to have technical design level knowledge in order to understand these things; simple end users like you won't understand these topologies.
When units are focused on their segments quality gets better delivered. PTCL by having everything of their own have collapsed in managing their network and TW in just 3 years swept them off their feet! I still use PTCL but its going to turn off from first of next month and TW is quite convincing in their quality after a week test run I can rate it 90 percent better output.
If PTCL is so good then why is the case that they are loosing market credibility among large and small players?
Bilal, I am actually laughing after reading your posting.
Firstly, I do not wish to disclose tw1's network design or the number of devices in their infrastructure or PTCL's for that matter.
Secondly, the 3.5 hour outage speaks for itself. Your 3 x fortification of the network resiliency hasn't worked from a layman's perspective. Hmmmmm so there were two fiber cuts affecting the fiber fing connecting the landing station to the tw1 PoP in Karachi. This is why God gave us Murphy and his laws :). Now, as an exercise, calculate the revenue loss of all operators on TW1 network and let us know the figure.
The purpose of my original posting was to tell the audience how much bandwidth PTCL has. You seem to have taken that as an insult which implies that tw1's bandwidth is way lesser than this number. Can you share that number with us?
No matter how well a network is designed, there are chances of an outage. There have been numerous outages on PTCL network as well, which is a large network with high redundancy.
Unless you provide some figures regarding the number of tw1 customers and PTCL customers, statements such as why is PTCL losing credibility etc don't make any sense.
You need to be reminded of history when the loss that customers faced for not 3.5 hours but 48 hours occurred during the riots of BB assassination when PTCL only long haul was cut in two. We had to shut down our call center during that outage and lost our business operations and contract and had to pay heavy penalties over that embarrassment.
As far as market share of TWA is concerned its all over the industry and over the internet. To start with a credible blog like this is saying that 46 percent of traffic is coming through Transworld.
Note: Above comment was modified by the author to remove remarks which did not add to the discussion.
Mr Bilal, how much is the TOTAL IP TRANSIT CAPACITY OF THE TW1 CABLE SYSTEM AT THE MOMENT?
Bilal u r right, after having 13 yrs of telecom experience me find Tw1 better option then PTCL
it seems a problem has again occurred, cannot open half of the websites just instantly, has failed around 2:30-2:45am.