Following their network outage on March
22nd 2014, The Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) proved
sensitive to their customers’ frustrations and acted quickly to apologize for
service disruption and promptly awarded financial compensation to customers
affected.
As the Utilities Regulation and
Competition Authority (URCA) launched an investigation, BTC also lost no time
on their own investigation to determine the root cause of a system outage that
left telecommunications customers impacted.
During the course of BTC’s investigation
it was determined that the outage was due solely to a failure in BTCs back-up
power system and the problem has since been rectified. BTC’s CEO, Mr. Leon Williams states that “the
outage last March was caused by a catastrophic power outage due to back-up
power failure. Unfortunately, when the business attempted to take our Poinciana
Power Plant off commercial power in favour of back-up power, the back-up
batteries which should have carried the load failed.”
In light of this, Power Plant
improvement-works were initiated in April 2014 and are 95% completed with an
expected end date of March 31st 2015. These updates include new power back-up equipment
that result in a higher capacity more efficient full service Power Plant, designed
to deliver the requisite ‘fail-safe’ solution in the event of another
commercial power outage.
Mr. Williams stated that the substantiation
of the improvements in the Power Plant infrastructure is evident in the
performance of the system during the commercial power outage on March 13th
2015.
“The most recent BEC island-wide
commercial power outage on Friday March 13th resulted in only a
short, five minute data outage which we quickly resolved.
-more-
2.
During the course of that BEC weekend
outage, BTC kept mobile coverage up on approximately 90% of the sites across
The Bahamas through a combination of fixed and mobile, site generators, site
batteries and fuel cells,” said Mr. Williams.
CEO, Mr. Leon Williams said that the
company is sensitive to the needs of its customers which is why it is quick to
act and is also diligent about informing its customers, sending out the
requisite advisories across their many communication channels.
“We take our brand message seriously and
we are completely committed to listening to our customers, and committed to
improving every day. We are transparent in that we acknowledge service
disruptions and we work quickly to resolve any issues. Essentially, all of us at BTC want the same
as the general public as far as reliability and connectivity from our telephone
company. Since the incident a year ago we’ve worked with URCA to meet their
requirements and have implemented adequate redundancies, resilience and
contingencies in our network to effectively remove all major weaknesses and
vulnerabilities.”
Mr. Leon Williams continued, saying that
they are reviewing the URCA Report for any other ways that BTC can make further
improvements to the networks and systems.
“We will continue to work with the
Regulator, they have a job to do as we do, and at the end of the day, the
customer must come first and everything possible must be done to deliver telecommunications
services, and products worthy of our Bahamian people and worthy to carry The
Bahamas in its name.”
URCA finds BTC in Breach of its Individual Operating License (IOL)