A cut cable and system failure prevented thousands of BTC customers from using their telephones yesterday. In a space of 24 hours, the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) revealed that a construction worker accidentally sliced through a fibre optic cable and that a system ‘meltdown,’ hit prepaid subscribers.
Speaking at a press conference yesterday, Tellis Symonette, Vice President of Wireless and Internet Services for BTC said: “A contractor did some work in that area and what happened was our main fibre trunk cable was cut. As a result, many customers in the 341 and 361 [landline] exchanges are without services at this point in time.”
Mr Symonette added that the government-run corporation was working around the clock to fix the damaged cable and keep phone service disruption at a minimum.
“We have a crew out there working on that cable as we speak, [in order] to try and quickly restore services to [such] customers,” he said.
Up until press time, phone services in south central New Providence were still off-line.
Meanwhile, services for prepaid GSM and TDMA subscribers were restored yesterday morning, after a system failure on Tuesday. “All our prepaid systems are up and running,” said Symonette. “We might have isolated cases of a few phones here and there. But generally, the system is really functioning as it was prior to the malfunction on [Tuesday].”
The BTC official explained that about 3:50 p.m. Tuesday, the public phone company experienced a serious failure with disk drives that support their prepaid platform.
“We had about six disks that failed for some reason and those disks are primarily responsible for running the prepaid application that would serve the GSM and TDMA prepaid customers,” he said. “This would amount to 176,000 people. So when that occurred [Tuesday] afternoon, all call processing for prepaid [cell phones] only stopped.”
According to Mr Symonette, BTC technicians worked feverishly throughout Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning to rectify the problem.
“We worked all Tuesday afternoon trying to restore service to the platform,” he explained. “At about 10:30 p.m., customers with GSM prepaid [cell phones] were allowed to call out. At about 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday, customers with GSM prepaid cell phones were able to receive calls. “Also yesterday morning at about 11:05, we were able to convert the TDMA prepaid customers,” he continued. “So as we speak today, those customers with GSM and TDMA are able to make and receive calls.” Still, Mr Symonette maintained that this recent incident has prompted BTC to impose new preventative measures. “It’s kind of strange because ordinarily, we didn’t expect all those drives to go at one time,” he said. “In house, we now have a strategy in place where if it happens again, we will not have a long outage. We will have a shorter time frame where we can quickly restore some service through work-around methods.”
He also insisted that BTC is prepared to handle any other disruptions, should they occur in the future.
“We are doing all we can, although I must say that over the last couple of months, we have had some problems with the GSM network while trying to upgrade the system,” he said. “We can say that BTC is working as hard as it can to ensure that [if a disruption of service happens again, it will not be for a long period of time.] We will work around the clock to correct it as quickly as we can.”
By: JASMIN BONIMY, The Nassau Guardian
