Ernest Dempsey - In 2001, the first Internet cafés started working in Hangu city. For the rest of the world its history shows what struggles there are in reaching towns and cities in under-developed countries and how people prevail despite the stress from radical groups in these places.When the Internet began in Hangu City, they were small, one-room, privately owned places, mostly on the upper floor at a few places in the main market area. Charging 20 rupees an hour, these cafes provided a not-so-private place to customers who had to sit in a row before computers, separated by a wooden frame, unlike those separate wooden compartments in big cities at that time. But young men in Hangu started to benefit from this new service untiringly, spending hours and hours chatting and browsing. It was a whole new experience for the young men of the town. No wonder these small stuffy cafes grew in number rapidly. Not only did these fellows flocked in at these cafés (a misnomer of course) for using internet, but also for watching music and movie videos stored on computers available to them. These were the guys not interested in studies, truants, or who weren’t students but had some pocket money to buy a little leisure time. Here was the start of the problem for the more educated guys who needed the Internet for correspondence and other non-leisure purposes: with loud music played in the café by the café owners (who too had become addicted to Hindi film songs), they needed a private, peaceful place to search online and apply for jobs or seek admission etc. And the solution was home; dial-up connections over landline were soon set up at home by many users.
That dial-up Internet service worked by means of net cards sold at shops and ranging in variety from a 10-rupee card (buying one hour of Internet use) to those costing hundreds of rupees (consumed primarily by the same hourly rate, but with some discount). Even the 50 kb/s speed of those dial-up connections was a luxury at that time. Power outage episodes aside, not only could you check email without a lot of interruption but also could listen to audios and save wallpapers, chat online, and do the usual Internet stuff. Sometimes, you could even download short videos. Having Internet at home was a great convenience for those who could afford having their own computer and would rather not sit in the noisy closets of the town’s stuffy net cafes.
Things were gradually improving in the communication services at the town as cell phones had arrived and were getting in common use too. But then came the terrible wave of sectarian violence that segued into Talibanizaion of the region around the town and the influence of Islamist insurgents was more often than not felt inside the town. In February 2006, the first suicide bombing incident shook the whole town out of its gradually declining sense of comfort. The blast obliterated an Ashora procession of the Shia community of the town, acting as a precursor to the mayhem that was witnessed in and around the town in the coming years. But it wasn’t only the initiation of deadly violence against human life in the area; it was also the prologue to the demise of the Internet’s budding life in a place that had just started making progress in communication services. After the 2006 Ashora procession incident, the Shia community burnt down dozens of shops, belonging to the Sunni sect, in the town as an angry protest against the toll the blast had taken on the lives of their community in the town. This caused damage worth hundreds of millions of rupees.
Soon to follow were bomb blasts targeting video and CD shops while threats were issued to the Internet cafes also to close down or suffer the same fate. Thus, the remaining video and CD shops as well as Internet cafes in the main market area became a deleted page in history. Home users of Internet, however, kept benefitting from the service which had started showing signs of cracking. By 2009, the situation had become a big disappointment as communication lines had suffered horribly due to continued insurgency around the town: bomb blasts, suicide attacks, and target killing besides an annual outburst of sectarian war. The power situation also had turned into a big crisis with 18 hours of blackouts daily. Telephones worked, but the Internet worked only in name. While the cell phone service thrived in Hangu, Internet died without any care from people, many of whom even left the town and got settled in cities to escape the terror pervading the place.
Internet was revived, however, last year as DSL service was started in Hangu. Computer service shops as well as personal users working at home got the new service of the speediest Internet existing in the country. This rebirth of the Internet at first cheered up active Internet users including journalists who could now hope to send news and recorded audios and videos from their station to the respective bureau offices in a timely manner. But the hopes fell flat as the new service turned out irritatingly unsteady, breaking down frequently during whatever time the power outages allowed the users to log on to the worldwide web. While the power situation remains as paralyzing as before, particularly in summer, DSL in Hangu isn’t steady and speedy as one would expect it to be; in the hours when power is running steady at the house, the 100 Mb/s Internet service keeps breaking down, sometimes unavailable for hours. Though a few telecommunication companies also introduced wireless broadband service working via a USB stick, it is way too expensive and, again, lacking in any potential to work steadily while still connecting at less than 250 kb/s.
Currently, the Internet service in Hangu is in a transitional stage from an old dial-up system of service to high-speed DSL service that would ensure round-the-clock provision of Internet service to consumers at fixed monthly charges. In a turbulent atmosphere as surrounds the town, it is no wonder that the transition isn’t smooth. As the repair of the road between Hangu and Kohat city continues, the DSL cables are often scratched by the mechanical work which causes interruptions in the Internet connectivity in Hangu. But the biggest fear is that slackness in upgrading the communication lines may send Hangu back to the good old days when you didn’t have to wait for hours to get the Internet connected at home. And if that happens to be the case, not many will be disappointed since the dial-up was a service more reliable than the current high-speed version (as it is called). If only the dealers could preserve those oldies to benefit from in times such as ours!