Power outages pose risk of 'connectivity blackouts'.

ISLAMABAD -- The telecom industry has warned the government of connectivity failures if prolonged power outages continue amid high fuel costs and stringent conditions on battery imports.

'Despite having backup power available in the form of generators and batteries, cellular operators are finding it almost impossible to cope with the quantum of these power outages that are beyond our dimensioned backup capacity,' leading cellular mobile operators (CMOS) Jazz, Telenor, PTCL and Ufone said in a letter to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA).

The letter was written to draw the telecom regulator's attention to 'some critical economy-wide factors, which are directly impeding and are expected to further severely constrain the operators' ability to meet the existing [quality of service] obligations ... [key performance indicators] as well as our network rollout obligations under the new licence conditions'.

They also lamented that rapidly increasing fuel prices were placing extra constraints on the provision of generator backup for their base transceiver station (BTS) sites.

Telecom companies tell PTA they can't run on backup options in face of costly fuel, strict conditions on battery imports

Besides, this extra fuel consumption for backup was going against the 'government's objective of rationalising fuel consumption in these testing times', they said, adding that the situation had made it a 'massive challenge' for the operators to maintain network availability.

The letter also stressed that the situation had worsened after the State Bank of Pakistan had imposed a 100 per cent cash margin restriction on the import of network/backup equipment, including batteries.

The situation had 'severely dented' the CMOs' ability to roll out more sites to meet the licensed quality of service requirements but also 'drastically impedes addition of more backup capacity to counter these extended power outages', the letter said.

The recent fiscal and political developments had further impacted the country's 'already deteriorating health of capital-intensive telecom sector'...

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