It is not less than a revolution in the internet domain in Pakistan, with the addition of a contemporary undersea cable which is to be installed from Africa to South Asia. This connects the new pearl of the 2Africa Pearls project. The coupling of this new cable is due in the coming days. The coming cable will stretch 45,000 kilometers and will carry a load of per second 180 terabits, which will enhance the speed of the internet, particularly social media applications, and other online services.
Pakistan will be one of the countries benefiting from the participation in 2Africa Pearls; Pakistan will have connectivity henceforth with one of the 46 landing stations installed across 33 countries and, thus, partnering with the development globally in digital infrastructure. As if timely, this announcement comes since Pakistan ranks 198 in global speed rankings with the following average download speeds: 19.59 Mbps for mobile internet and 15.52 Mbps for broadband internet.
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For many, these slow speeds and frequent outages have affected so much like the freelancing community in Pakistan. Explaining this was Federal Minister of State for Information Technology Shaza Fatima Khawaja, who said excessive use of the VPNs has also contributed to slow internet services since when some apps’ services got blocked, people started using VPNs, which bypassed local and further slowed the internet.
Now that the 2Africa cable project is already set in motion, it is expected that once it connects, some of such issues will possibly alleviate and bring a sigh of relief not only to Pakistani internet users but also to the digital economy of the nation.