Bahamas News

GSM cell phone users experienced an interruption in service on Tuesday after a power surge caused the Bahamas Telecommunications Company’s system to crash.

Vice President of Marketing Marlon Johnson explained that the incident occurred shortly before 7am.

“We had a failure on our pre-paid platform that was linked to a power supply that seized a particular segment of our grid and we may have had a power surge on a particular line that tripped a series of breakers,” Mr. Johnson said. “That included the backup and redundancy supply and that set it offline.”

Services were resumed shortly after 2pm. Mr. Johnson said BTC officials faced a number of challenges.

“I think the challenge was that we had to isolate the power line and that took some time,” he said. “What we had to do is not only turn it back on but we had to rewire the system to make sure that it doesn’t collapse again.”

Mr. Johnson said BTC officials are currently working on upgrading the GSM system. He said by the end of this year all of the services pertaining to cell phones should improve.

“We want to expand both the capacity and the coverage to get inside buildings which many people have been challenged with,” he said.

“We want to upgrade it so that its service is more comfortable to what TDMA offers and we have to do so because we are decommissioning the TDMA by the end of the year,” Mr. Johnson added.

“So we recognize fully that we have to bring our GSM to a standard where persons are comfortable migrating and [to ensure] that we don’t have some of these outgoing coverage issues that persons face now.”

Mr. Johnson said the government intends to spend an estimated $40 million to upgrade the GSM system in The Bahamas.

Meantime, Mr. Johnson said the company apologizes for any inconvenience caused as a result of the GSM shutdown on Tuesday.

“We apologize significantly for what has happened and we are in discussions to find out ways in which we can compensate persons for their inconvenience,” he said. “I can’t tell you what that will mean, but we are doing all we can to get the system back up and running.”

Source: Bahama Journal