KARACHI:
An industry source told Reuters that thousands of mobile phone towers across Pakistan had gone offline as a result of a statewide power outage on Monday, raising the possibility of a communications blackout in some areas of the nation.
On Monday, a significant outage in Pakistan’s national grid rendered millions of people without energy. The roughly 40,000 communications towers across the nation are already being affected by the disturbance.
phone towers go offline: According to the source from the telecommunications sector, if power is not restored quickly, it might result in a communications blackout when mobile phone towers run out of backup fuel and batteries.
He continued by saying that service degradation had started in various areas of the nation as a result of towers going offline. Mobile signal disappearance was reported by certain Pakistani social media users in the nation’s major cities, including Islamabad.
Former senator Sehar Kamran tweeted, “No signals at the Karakoram residences, Diplomatic Enclave, Islamabad.” Separately, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the nation’s regulatory body for telecommunications, issued a warning about outages. Users may experience service interruptions due to the widespread power outage, according to a statement from PTA.
It said that operators have been told to alert users and to make every effort to replenish backup power on as many cell tower locations as possible. When asked how many of Pakistan’s communication towers were down, a PTA official remained silent.
The country-wide power outage had a severe impact on telecommunications in most regions of the country. According to data provided by the international internet monitoring company Netblocks, there was a sharp reduction in internet access. Netblocks also noted a sharp reduction in internet access due to the power outage.
According to PTA, Pakistan has 124 million broadband subscribers and 194 million cellular subscribers.