The Tribune

By SANCHESKA BROWN

Tribune Staff Reporter

sbrown@tribunemedia.net

THE Utilities Regulation & Competition Authority is awaiting an official report from the Bahamas Telecommunications Company before it can start an official investigation of this weekend’s island-wide network outage.

URCA CEO Kathleen Riviere-Smith said once BTC has fulfilled its reporting requirement to URCA on the network outage, the regulator expects an investigation will be launched to determine the depth of Saturday’s outage.

“We are waiting for BTC to formally inform us of what happened, which has not been done yet. We cannot rely on what is in the media right now, we have to be officially informed by BTC. They do have a condition in their license where if there is an outage they have to notify us,” she said.

“Whether or not there will be penalties will depend on the amount of time the network was down, the impact on the islands, and the number of customers that were affected. We have to determine if it was something that was previously seen and that’s how we will go about our investigation and how we proceed in terms of penalty. It is a process and they have to officially notify us. But it is still very early at this point. The last time there was an outage, there was no penalty per se, but BTC did agree to credit customers on different levels for different services. They also had some work to do to ensure that a similar occurrence did not happen in the future. I cannot say if what happened is similar in terms of why it occurred, but there are provisions in their license for that, but each occurrence will have to stand on its own.”

BTC said that unspecified “technical failures” were the cause of a nearly 24-hour disruption in land line, mobile and Internet services this weekend.

BTC said it will provide some measure of compensation for the inconvenience and will announce those details in the coming days.

The company also suffered a system-wide meltdown last June which affected more than 300,000 mobile, landline and broadband customers. Company officials reported that a power outage knocked out BTC’s network management centre on Poinciana Drive. Six months later, URCA found that BTC failed to implement preventive measures and could face serious penalties if the problems were not addressed.

In a statement, URCA said BTC was in breach of a condition of its individual operating license by “failing to take all reasonably practicable steps to maintain to the greatest extent possible, the proper and effective functioning of its public telephone network.”

In its investigations, URCA also found that BTC failed to establish adequate redundancies, resiliencies and contingencies in its network design.