The Tribune

By DENISE MAYCOCK

Tribune Freeport Reporter

dmaycock@tribunemedia.net

PHIL Bentley, CEO of Cable and Wireless, says the company is investing “heavily” in Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) to improve its mobile reliability in the Bahamas.

BTC has been criticised for its poor cellular service, particularly relating to dropped calls, and with new competition seeking to enter the market, Mr Bentley said reliability is a huge priority.

“We are aware that a new mobile engine is going to be coming into the market and it is our job to make sure we are ready for the competition,” he said in Grand Bahama yesterday.

“We are spending money where our customers want – and they want more reliable network for our mobile calls. We have been investing heavily in improving our mobile reliability – that is one big area we are investing.”

Mr Bentley said that BTC has already started to make progress. “I have spoken to the Prime Minister a couple weeks ago who said for the first time now he can drive from his home to his office in Nassau and not drop calls. So I think it is a great testament to Leon (Willliams) and the technical capabilities of the team that we are starting to fix the issues and we are seeing drop calls come down and reliability improve significantly,” he said.

He said that in the Bahamas BTC has LTE (long term evolution) networks, which is the fastest in the region.

BTC has received $65m from Cable and Wireless for upgrades and has been able to rectify various issues on their mobile network to address dropped calls. CEO Leon Williams said they expect to complete installation of some 28 cell sites in the Bahamas. He said Grand Bahama will also get some additional cell sites that will increase capacity and coverage on the island.

“We started the migration of the Legacy Digital Telephone Network onto the IT network that we refer to as the NGN or Next General Network. We had a number of complaints from customers who said they have never experienced dropped calls on the fixed lines before. And in a couple of weeks, we would have migrated most of the GB network onto new NGN.”

He said BTC will be able to improve speed on internet connectivity “and DSL (digital subscriber lines) to achieve speeds up to 20 to 40 megabits per seconds on the line.”