The Tribune

By AVA TURNQUEST

Tribune Staff Reporter

aturnquest@tribunemedia.net

BTC’s primary network for voice calls was ranked as best in class in the region according to it’s network supplier, which benchmarked the network’s performance against other carriers around the world.

As the company continues to evolve to meet consumer demands, CEO Geoff Houston explained that Ericsson, the world’s largest supplier of mobile networks, ranked BTC’s 2G performance in the top 10 among networks worldwide.

Mr Houston said: “We’ve got two networks, our 2G and our 4G, and 93 per cent of all voice calls are carried on our 2G network. As it stands today our 2G network is world class, our 4G network which carries about seven per cent of the voice is predominantly a data network.

“The dropped calls on the 4G network are slightly higher than the 2G but it still put us in a top 20 network worldwide based on Ericsson networks and Ericsson assessment.

“So while we think there is a slight problem on the 4G, we don’t believe that there is a significant issue on the 2G network amd that’s where the majority of voice comes.”

Management yesterday lauded substantial improvements to service and technical capacity since the company was privatised in 2011.

Marlon Johnson, BTC’s senior vice-president of brands and communications, said: “If you look at our network 18 months ago, 12 months ago, if you wanted to top up on a Friday you couldn’t, you couldn’t top up because there was no capacity on the network. Today it’s not an issue. If you were living in the southwest part of the island on a Friday you couldn’t make your call, and it’s not that the call dropped, the call wasn’t there. There was no capacity in those areas, in a lot of our family island communities we didn’t have 2G coverage much less 2G and 4G coverage.

“That’s not to take away from the real capacity issues that we have but what we do ask our customers to do is when they find these things, they send it to us because it does help. Call or send us an email giving us the specifics around your dropped call issues. It really does help us fine tune the network and to uncover whether it is a device issue or account issue or a network issue.”

In the past two years, BTC has come under heavy criticism from the public, and government over cellular service.

Yesterday, Mr Houston explained that resulting challenges paralleled the experience of North American carriers such as AT&T or Verizon.

Mr Houston said AT&T faced considerable coverage difficulties when they upgraded their network due to the increased demand for data service, which lessened the capacity for voice calls.