VPNs Caused Pakistan Internet Service to Slow Down Shaza Fatima IT Minister

source associate press of pakistan

VPNs Caused Pakistan Internet Service to Slow Down Shaza Fatima IT Minister

This was said by the Federal Minister of State for Information Technology, Ms Shaza Fatima Khawaja while responding to question over the decline in internet speed in the recent past across the country. Subsequently, during the press conference held in Islamabad, she was keen to point out that government had not restrained or intentionally slowed down internet service as some of the populace and multiple rumors suggested it.

The Minister further said that technological advancement spearheaded by VPNs was cited as the leading cause of the slow down. VPNs are services that enable users to avoid the use of local services allowing to access sites that may be inaccessible or very slow in some areas. VPN’s main function is to provide privacy and security, but the major disadvantage is that they eventually add an extra load to each internet facility. While this traffic increase has impacted on slowing down the overall internet speed, mobile internet has recorded the worse scenario due to congesting.

Due to a number of factors, the usage of VPN connection has become prevalent in Pakistan to safeguard privacy, to unblock certain sites or just to mask identity. But this is an irony that, with this new prevalence of peoples’ using VPN connections, the internet networks of this country are also under pressure. The utilization of encryption and tunneling that VPN connections imposes causes high utilization of bandwidth and processing power that reduces internet speeds for the general public.

Fatima Khawaja further said that it should be clear to the public now that the government is fully awake to the problem and is seeking ways and means to make Internet services better in the country. Regarding the matter, she said that the government never blocked the internet and currently, does not throttle connection speeds, although the current load created by VPNs partially affect the problem. Its key goal thus rests on the promotion of speed and reliability of the internet connection so that clients throughout the country can be offered a better internet connection.

Besides the needs related to the improvement of internet speed, the Minister, Mr. Khawaja, informed about the creation of the Digitization Commission. This endeavour is intended to enhance the level of digitization within the economy of Pakistan to what is current and even more modish along with competitive in the contemporary world. Commission will co-ordinate various processes of increasing the digital activity in the economy of the country: developing the e-commerce, fintech and IT sectors.