Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has confirmed that the recent internet outages were due to ‘upgradation’ of a Web Management System which will go on for two to three months and that the contracts for this process were made by internet operators.

Caretaker Information Minister Murtaza Solangi made headlines earlier this week when he said that there was ‘no guarantee’ that internet outages would not take place around election time.

Solangi made the remarks in a press conference in Islamabad, going on to say that the reasons for internet outages were ‘technical’ and there matters related to ‘system installations’ involved in the issue.

DG PTA also chipped in, saying that ‘a software was being upgraded and the upgradation could face problems’.

The country has seen three instances of internet disruption in recent months on December 17, January 7 and January 20. Although the government continues to insist its innocence, all three days coincided with online PTI events that had been announced in advance.

In a response to a query by Aaj News, PTA said that the operation referred to by the minister and DG in the press conference involved Web Management Systems on landing stations.

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“The deployment/upgradation/testing of Web Management System(s) is currently ongoing on landing stations for internet submarine cables i.e Sea-Me-We 3,4,5 etc. which is likely to be completed in next 2-3 months,” a PTA spokesperson said.

However, the spokesperson did not comment on how long the process had been going on and when it had begun.

The statement by PTA also explained that the systems being upgraded were set up to counter grey traffic and illegal content under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act.

“Please note that the Web Management System(s) are deployed by the operators as per their regulatory obligations and under the directions of the court of law, to counter grey traffic and illegal content under PECA 2016,” the statement added.

The Authority also said that it was not part of ‘any procurement or contractual arrangement’ for the system being upgraded.

What is web monitoring system

The web monitoring system or WMS that Pakistan acquired in 2018 from Canada based firm Sandvine uses deep packet inspection (DPI) to monitor communications over the internet.

It is akin to postal censorship back in the days of your great-grandfather when during the war people at the post office would open letters, read them and cover several lines with black ink. This censorship was different from the post office refusing to deliver every letter to a certain address.

In the world of internet, we have (a) conventional filtering that only looks at the header of packets (chunks of data) — similar to looking at the address on the envelop — and (b) deep packet inspection or DPI that “ locates, identifies, classifies and reroutes or blocks packets with specific data or code payloads.“

So, in our postal censorship analogy, while some people at an address continue to receive their letters others get letters with blotted out lines. Of course, in today’s world, this censorship is carried out using computers and it requires extensive processing – so much processing that the task was impossible until a few years ago.

But now several countries are using WMS including Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and several other countries.

The firewall at your office also uses the same technology to keep the hackers out of the company network.

As with the firewall, an aggressive implementation of DPI could lead to poor internet speed.

However, PTA has recently directed the operators/vendors to ensure that during this phase, internet users in Pakistan should not face any interruption or degradation.