The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

THE Bahamas Chamber of Commerce and Employers Confederation's (BCCEC) chairman yesterday urged the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) to pay financial compensation to businesses hurt by cellular service disruption, adding that the carrier had promised the problems would be fully resolved "within 30 days".

Responding to Tribune Business questions after a separate power failure at BTC's key Poinciana Drive network centre yesterday knocked out all cellular - and most fixed-line - services on New Providence, Chester Cooper said this and previous disruptions to the carrier's mobile offering had resulted in losses for many Bahamian businesses.

Most impacted, he added, were small businesses and entrepreneurs who worked 'on the road' and relied on their cell phones for 100 per cent of their communications. BTC, which is still the monopoly provider of cellular services in the Bahamas, said disruptions prior to yesterday's were caused by necessary upgrades to the new 4G network.

"The constant and unfortunate disruption in cell phone services affects productivity, and no doubt results in loss of business to many businesses," Mr Cooper told Tribune Business. "I am particularly sympathetic to small businesses who work from the road, using a cell phone as their only tool for communications.

"The BCCEC has discussed this matter candidly with BTC, and they have assured us that the situation will be resolved once and for all within 30 days when their infrastructure upgrades are completed."

And the BCCEC chairman added: "Whilst I commend BTC for investing in the upgrades and appreciate the longer term view.... many businesses suffer in the meantime as a result of the downtime.

"I trust that, at a minimum, BTC will provide refunds to the business community as an effort to compensate for the excessive down times experienced recently."

BTC has invested heavily, and moved rapidly, to roll-out its 4G cellular network across the Bahamas over the past year, following a privatisation process in which a majority 51 per cent stake in the carrier was sold to Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC) and its Caribbean arm, LIME.

Yesterday's woes resulted from a power failure at BTC's Poinciana Drive facility, which houses most of its network facilities, with the carrier's back-up power systems - batteries and a generator - both failing. This issue is separate and distinct from the ongoing disruptions resulting from the 4G upgrade, yet the combination of both prompted one business executive to say: "They must really want the Government to take them back."

The 4G network that BTC is now installing is designed to provide the "high speed connectivity" and platform for mobile broadband, giving the carrier - which has a monopoly in cellular services until 2014 - the foundation "to drive up the whole usage and penetration of mobile broadband across the Bahamas".

Geoff Houston, BTC's chief executive, previously told Tribune Business that "huge upgrades" to the cellular network took place over the first weekend in June, with the newly-privatised carrier "changing out" the text and voice platforms, along with the pre-paid billing systems. This, he added, was "impacting every single subscriber". BTC has 249,000 pre-paid and 47,000 post-paid customers.

BTC, Mr Houston said then, was already seeing strong mobile demand in islands where the 4G network was already installed - Grand Bahama, Abaco, the Berry Islands and Bimini. It had now been "rolled out" across 50 per cent of the Bahamas, with the remaining islands to be completed over the next 12 weeks before summer's end.

Alongside this, Mr Houston said BTC was also constructing a new 2G cellular network, the idea being that this would handle cellular voice traffic, thus freeing up its 4G counterpart for data traffic via mobile broadband.

The BTC chief executive estimated that in CWC's first two years of majority ownership, the carrier would have spent $48 million by end-March 2013 on "changing out" the cellular network, installing the new 2G and 4G platforms, and all the billing and management systems.

Adding that "a small army" was working on the 4G network upgrade, Mr Houston added: "The biggest challenge we have is managing expectations while going through these many changes.

"It's been very challenging the last few weeks, but we're very confident based on the work in the last week that we've got through the bulk of the changes and it will settle down in the next few weeks."

The upgrade, he added, had not been easy "especially in a business not used to change".