Less than 24 hours after BTC experienced one of the worst outages in its history, the company’s engineers and technicians completed repairs restoring service throughout The Bahamas.
“Our engineers and technicians worked around the clock to mount a massive campaign getting all systems back up and running,” said BTC CEO Geoff Houston. “We are very pleased to advise that, thanks to their hard work and dedication, the mobile network was stable and all systems were back on track by 4pm today with only one small trouble area.” That spot, said Houston, was intermittent interference in calls from a land line to a mobile number. Houston said software experts were expected to resolve that challenge shortly.
The all-out effort followed Monday’s outage which was triggered by a power cut to the Poinciana Drive center facility that houses the heart of BTC’s operations. BTC executives said they are leaving no stone unturned in investigating the causes of the failure of back-up operating systems that should have kicked in following a power cut,
The outage was complete, disabling business and residential fixed lines, mobile phones and data service. Much of the service was restored by the close of business on Monday and BTC called a press conference to get word out through the media about the schedule of repairs and progress. As soon as data service was restored, BTC invited customers to log any complaints or needs for service on Facebook or to call the call centre. The company hosts the country’s most popular Facebook site with some 75,000 friends and fans. It was active day and night and the call centre took the highest volume of calls in its history.
“The call centre experienced triple the normal volume of calls today and we made an attempt to deal with every single one of them individually,” said Marlon Johnson, Vice President, Brand & Channels.
The failure that had left business, government and private customers without landline, cell or data services happened on the same day that Prime Minister Perry G. Christie was scheduled to meet with majority shareholder Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC) CEO Tony Rice.
BTC said a separate issue that affected customers in Abaco this morning had also been resolved and service was restored to the northern islands.
