How Good Is Pakistan's Internet Infrastructure?

The Internet infrastructure in Pakistan is struggling to be in the line of international standards. Pakistan is still away from these standards. The following reasons can be considered for these sub standards.

1. The dial-up connections in Pakistan is the cheapest but also the worse to use. The connection speed is not up-to the standards. The 56K connection normally downloads the data at 3k. The quality of the telephone lines in most areas of Pakistan (except few major cities) is very poor. Sometime the connectivity is not possible through theses poor quality telephone lines.

2. The Broadband is almost new technology in Pakistan. Even some of the telephone exchanges don't have the broadband equipment to facilitate. The rates of these services are higher (though, these are reducing gradually).
3. The Internet backbone of Pakistan is connected through a single fiber optic cable. In last year this cable was damaged and the whole connectivity was disturbed.
4. The wireless Internet connection is also the new technology is Pakistan. The use of GPRS is just started. The Edge technology has yet to be launched (only one mobile operator is providing this service).

The things are changing quickly and we can hope that after couple of years the environment will be changed and the infrastructure will be formed to the international standards.

Pakistan has taken great leap and bounds to help improve its internet infrastructure to reach the place where it is placed now. However it is still miles away from an average Internet Infrastructure, let alone the leaders.

Though, Pakistan is not blessed with the best economies in the world, it is the responsibility of the government to make use of the limited funds in the best possible way and to be able provide that to its citizen. However, in direct contrast to the government claims of bringing a revolution in the IT industry.

Internet Surfers around the country suffer from slow and expensive connectivity. With cable Internet starting to grasp a market, it is still unreachable to the masses due to its price tag. Just looking across the border in China is a totally different scenario, where by China is also a poor country, its Internet structure is much better and its prices much more affordable by the general citizens.

With the fiasco of June 2005, a 12 day black out was enough to make a statement that Pakistan does not have a viable back up strategy if the main stream Internet fails. This adds to the vows of Internet in Pakistan.

To add icing to the cake, on Feb 28, 2007, on Supreme Court orders PTCL blocked entire web domains and a huge chunk of IP addresses making it difficult for people to log into the most commonly visited websites such as G-mail. The affects of these actions can be unthinkable as investors would be inclined towards our neighbours' growing industry than to come to Pakistan and face the fragile structure added with miss-management where by users are stranded on their computer with no information on their finger tips.