The Tribune

By SANCHESKA BROWN

Tribune Staff Reporter

sbrown@tribunemedia.net

THE Bahamas Telecommunications Company  plans to introduce its Long Term Evolution (LTE) network in a few weeks, BTC CEO Geoff Houston said yesterday.

Mr Houston said by the end of this month the company would have changed out “every single piece” of the old mobile network they found in place before Cable and Wireless took over BTC. This move paves the way for LTE which is three times faster that 4g, which we will be done installing by the end of the month.

“We have changed all the radio, billing systems, provisioning systems, voice mail and texting systems and we aren’t stopping there,” he said.

“We are moving to the next version LTE – which is three times faster than 4g. We want to try out a trial in the next month. We have already acquired our spectrum from URCA and we already have our supplier contacts in place. The equipment is being shipped as we speak and we expect to get a trial run in by January. We are aimed to get it all finished by the middle of 2014.”

Mr Houston said with the 4g network expected to be completely in place by the end of this month, customers can expect better service and fewer dropped calls.

He said: “Certainly we have been challenged and one of our biggest challenges we have found is that we came into a network and we put in  30 to 40 per cent additional capacity but all that has been gobbled up by our  customers. In fact in some of our areas we have had to increase capacity by 400 per cent. On top of that we have another capacity upgrade happening this month. which we hadn’t planned to do which is another  2 million dollar investment. Hopefully for now that will deal with all those issues which have been leading to congestion which has caused the dropped call issues.”

Mr Houston said BTC also plans to introduce their new television services by the end of March 2013.