Islamabad3 cables serve Pakistan’s entire internet.
A fault in 1 throttles evening service; Pakistan Telecommunication Company’s next repair window runs May 11-18.
No backup connectivity exists; Pakistan ranked first globally in 2023 internet-outage losses, Top10VPN found.
Sources: Dawn
HOW THE INTERNET ACTUALLY TRAVELS
99% of intercontinental data moves through undersea fiber-optic cables, not satellites. About 600 cables crisscross the ocean floor, most thinner than a garden hose. A single cable carries tens of terabits per second — orders of magnitude more than any satellite constellation.
PAKISTAN'S THIN PIPE
Pakistan lands only a handful of submarine cables, all at Karachi — SEA-ME-WE-4, SEA-ME-WE-5, IMEWE, AAE-1, and PEACE. Compare to India, which lands 17+ cables across Mumbai, Chennai, Cochin, and Trivandrum. Concentration at one coastal city means one trawler anchor or one fault can throttle a nation of 240 million.
THE KARACHI CHOKEPOINT
Every major Pakistani submarine cable lands within a few kilometers of each other on the Karachi coast — at landing stations in Hawkesbay and Karachi proper. A single fishing trawler dragging anchor through the wrong patch of seabed has historically darkened banking, government, and consumer internet across the country.
WHY REPAIRS TAKE WEEKS
There are only about 60 cable-repair ships worldwide. They operate on rotation across vast ocean territories. When a fault occurs, the nearest ship may be servicing another break thousands of miles away. The vessel must transit, locate the fault with sonar, grapple the cable from depths up to 8,000 meters, splice it on deck, and re-lay it — each step weather-dependent.
THE BACKUP THAT ISN'T
Pakistan has one terrestrial alternative: the **Trans-Asia-Europe** fiber overland through China via the Khunjerab Pass. Capacity is a small fraction of submarine throughput, and Himalayan landslides regularly sever it. Satellite remains too expensive and low-bandwidth for mass consumer traffic — Starlink is not yet licensed in Pakistan.
THE OUTAGE LEAGUE TABLE
Top10VPN's annual cost-of-internet-shutdown index ranked Pakistan first globally in 2023 — ahead of Russia, Iran, and Ethiopia. The figure blends deliberate government throttling (during protests, exam periods, political unrest) with infrastructure failures. The two causes compound: a fragile network gives censors a cheap off-switch.