PTCL quietly reverses action to normalise Internet in Pakistan
'Pakistan Times' Monitoring Desk

ISLAMABAD: The Internet traffic returned to normalcy on Sunday morning after the Pakistan Telecommunication Company quietly reversed it flawed act of en masse blocking of Internet Protocols (IPs) in a bid to “filter out” derogatory websites containing blasphemous material, an English daily reporter Naveed Ahmad reports.

The Internet users could surf the cyber space without any problem after five days of frustrating sluggish or total blackout of countless critical websites. Opting for a quick-fix solution, the PTCL decided to revert to the pre-February 28 scenario and adopted more sophisticated and smarter means to filter out the blasphemous material from the worldwide web, sources from Karachi and Islamabad informed.

Over the past five days, the country’s IT-enabled industry has suffered direct heavy financial losses while the growing web-based email faced frustrating delays in accessing, receiving and send correspondence.

The PTCL technical team tried a shortcut to block the entire IP addresses instead of taking the trouble of filtering the suspicious websites and dealing them accordingly in the light of Supreme Court’s verdict.

The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and other IT-dependent businesses claim to have lost 20 to 30 per cent revenue during the past five days. An ISPAK official hinted at seeking damages from the PTCL. The telecom giant has never paid the promised compensation for 12-day outage of the Internet caused due to damage to an undersea cable and absence of efficient backup a couple of years ago.

After failing to reach the company spokesperson, the reporter was lucky to speak to the senior executive vice-president (IT) Ameer-ud-Din who believed, “We have not undone what we did to comply with the SC order. We are still filtering the websites.” When asked if the PTCL has not unblocked the IP addresses, then how come the packet drop ratio could be significantly reduced, Ameer-ud-Din insisted that tactics are changed and the order was implemented the same way.●