This
past week and the next two weeks was and will be a challenging time for users
and providers alike who use the internet. Three international sea cables
(SEMEWE4, IMEWE and EIG) that provide the majority of digital communication
between Asia to Europe were cut.
The two Pakistan international communication
gateway companies that provide internet backhauling services to all the ISPs of
Pakistan, PTCL and TWA, both depend on these cables for international
communication and therefore internet bandwidth coming into Pakistan dropped to
40%. It is expected to take up to 3 weeks or more before the ships dispatched
to fix the problems are able to get the cables operational again.
This event
coupled with the recent global DDOS attack attributed to a company in Amsterdam
which almost crippled the global internet puts a spotlight on the risks
involved with internet companies that cater to Pakistan’s 30 million strong
internet community but host all their content internationally.
Until
recently, hosting internationally made sense – Pakistan’s internet community
was not big enough to justify focus on the market, the datacenters and support
facilities were not at international standards and costs were 3-5 times that
available internationally. Therefore most content providers hosted their
content abroad and many did not even bother to setup caching or backup-sites
domestically.
However
recently, as the broadband market developed in Pakistan to where according to
PTA, over 2.2 million homes are connected to the internet by licensed
operators, there has been major investment in improving data center facilities
by most major licensed broadband operators In Pakistan. These new data centers
can compete with any international facility and the costs are also comparable.
For instance, managed datacenter services cost only 20-30% more than equivalent
services acquired in California’s silicon valley, the global hub of all
datacenters. Compare this slight cost to the advantages of hosting locally and
it is hard not to see why it makes sense to host content locally if your
business wholly or partially caters to the Pakistan internet community
“When
you look at the high quality of datacenter facilities now available locally,
and the recent decline in prices, factor in average internet connection latency
reduced from above 300ms to sub 20ms, and add in the advantages of local access
and support, the case for international and domestic content providers to host
in Pakistan becomes too strong to ignore”, says Salman Ansari, President SAATC,
one of Pakistan’s foremost IT and telecommunication consultants.
Zulfiqar
Qazilbash, the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Transworld Associates,
one of Pakistan’s two tier 1 internet providers talks about why a company that
provides internet backhauling services to most ISPs in Pakistan built a
datacenter in their landing station. “The TWA Landing station is the defacto
internet hub of Pakistan. It is the automatic peering point of all operators
that use TWA bandwidth directly or indirectly and is peered with the other
internet provider. The Tier 3 datacenter located inside the premises, provides
unmatched value proposition to Pakistani operators who has collocation needs.
For one thing, by collocating at the Landing Station, you have dramatically
controlled your last mile vulnerability, since you are connected to the
internet gateway note in the same building. Secondly, there is no better
peering location both for international and domestic traffic. Thirdly, you get
to leverage the infrastructure and engineering support that powers Pakistan’s
internet. Who else can offer that?”
A case
in point is the popular job portal, ROZEE.PK.
It is visited by over 60% of the country’s Internet users annually. To
service its 16 Million annual unique visitors, it requires 45 fault tolerant
load balanced servers. Previously, it used to collocate its entire server farm
between Silicon Valley and Germany since datacenters in Pakistan were expensive
and did not offer the required worry free support. “Transworld’s decision to
provide datacenter services at their internet gateway node was a game changer
for us”, says Monis Rahman, Chairman and CEO of ROZEE.PK. “The world class
facility allowed us to lower latency by a factor of 10 and we have the ability
to service our Pakistan clients even if there is a major internet crisis such
as the one that occurred last week. Our
servers have stayed humming while providing a better usability experience to
our customers”.
With
local and international content providers that focus on Pakistan’s internet
community now able to leverage advanced hosting platforms like the TWA
Datacenter, it is hoped that more internet based applications and services will
henceforth be available to the population. Internet can be a powerful and cost
effective medium for solving the education, health, e-commerce, e-government
and other problems of Pakistan.
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