Pakistan’s 8 million Internet users and 20% of its telephone users have lost usage almost a week after a “fault in a power cable feeding Pakistan’s sole fibre-optic international telecoms link deep below the Arabian Sea” that remains broken.
But more U.S. jobs are siphoned off while Pakistan’s fledgling industry grows:
They can offer foreign companies a cheap, English-speaking workforce while simultaneously benefiting their own employees. Average call centre wages are 8,000 dollars a year, far greater than the Pakistani average of 736 dollars.
The size of the business pales in comparison to the 14 billion dollars in revenue earned by Indian call centres, but operators here had hoped to attract around 10 percent of that within the next two or three years.
The cable breakdown “‘has definitely caused millions of dollars potential losses and a lot of intangible damage you cannot quantify,’ Farrukh Aslam, president of the Call Centres Association of Pakistan, said,” reports AFP/Yahoo. Have you had experiences with overseas call centers?