The fault which could not be repaired for almost 10 days caused colossal loss to the IT community in the form of reputation, reliability and also financially. The major losers were the call centers industry, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and software companies.

Jehan Ara, President, P@SHA feels that such incidents can result in the total loss of business to the IT enabled serv-ices industry. She feels that it is necessary that the government publicly gives assurance that alternate arrangements are being made immediately to ensure that this disruption does not take place again.

Some of the recommendations and actions taken at the meeting were to form a working group to address the requirements of the IT sector especially the call centers and the BPO companies.

-Open up provisioning of two-way vSat connectivity to all PASHA and Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) IT Enabled service companies including Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Long Distance and International (LDI) operators.

-The Ministry of Information Technology & Telecommunication (IT & T) and Pakistan Telecommunication Limited (PTCL) should communicate the exact rollout and commissioning dates for the SEAMEWE-4 and the land links to Amritsar and Iran.

-The Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA) should man-date a minimum level of service for data providers including redundancy.

-Re-write Service Level Agreements (SLAs) building in downtime compensation. At the moment this is very vague.

-Regular maintenance schedules should be clearly visible either on the Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA / Pakistan Telecommunication Limited (PTCL) or PSEB websites.

-A monitoring committee of P@SHA and PSEB members should be formed to work on critical infrastructure elements like Pakistan Internet Exchange, Fibre optic landing points and city hubs of bandwidth.

It is interesting to note that the companies within the folds of P@SHA, who had their own redundant infrastructures in place, were able to operate almost seamlessly with over and above 85% of their installed capacity but the members who were totally reliant on the limited satellite backup provided by the Ministry of IT &T, were able to conduct only a fraction of their business. Vigilant member companies were able to maintain decent service levels by routing their workflows through disaster recovery centers.