StormFiber’s underground fibre optic infrastructure was deliberately damaged at three separate locations in the Gulzar-e-Hijri area of Karachi on the morning of Eid ul Azha, leaving thousands of residential and commercial subscribers without internet connectivity during one of the most heavily used periods of the year for home broadband. The damage has been traced to unlicensed cable operators active in the locality, with sources suggesting that local and informal internet providers were responsible for the act of cutting StormFiber’s infrastructure, though official confirmation is still pending. StormFiber confirmed that restoration work has since been completed and all affected users have been brought back online, with field teams mobilised within hours of the incident to splice and repair the damaged cable segments.
Past incidents of this nature suggest these attacks are not random. They tend to recur around major occasions such as Eid, when household reliance on connectivity peaks and disruption inflicts maximum impact on subscribers. Unable to compete with licensed fibre on speed, reliability, and consistency, such informal operators are increasingly resorting to sabotage in areas where subscribers are switching to StormFiber. Users on social platforms expressed frustration over what they described as recurring instability and a lack of transparency during major outages, with some customers questioning why critical infrastructure appears vulnerable to repeated physical disruption at a time when digital connectivity has become central to daily life.
The broader issue, however, extends beyond a single operator or a single incident. Pakistan’s digital ambitions depend on the integrity of the physical infrastructure that underpins connectivity. Attacks on licensed telecom networks must be treated with urgency, with regulators, the government, law enforcement agencies, industry bodies, and the wider telecom ecosystem needing to act in coordination to protect long-term infrastructure investments and ensure that those resorting to sabotage to distort market competition are held accountable. The deliberate targeting of buried fibre optic infrastructure not only disrupts household and business connectivity but also undermines investor confidence in Pakistan’s broadband expansion at a time when the country is actively working to scale its digital economy and extend quality internet access to more urban and peri-urban areas.
PTA, as the sector regulator, has consistently faced calls to take more decisive action against unlicensed operators whose presence in formal service areas creates a parallel, unregulated market that competes through means outside the law. The Gulzar-e-Hijri incident is a stark reminder that infrastructure protection must be treated as a law enforcement and regulatory priority, not simply a technical problem for individual operators to resolve on their own. Without coordinated action to dismantle unlicensed networks and prosecute those responsible for deliberate cable damage, incidents of this kind are likely to continue, with subscribers bearing the cost each time.
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