The Tribune

The Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) yesterday said it was preparing to commission five new cellular sites, four of which will be completed and in service before the end of April.

The four sites coming on stream include locations at Sea Breeze, Soldier Road, Nassau Village and – just in time for the Carifta Games – the National Sporting Complex near Government High School. By the beginning of summer 2013, BTC hopes to have finalised a location and completed installation of a new site on Shirley Street in the vicinity of the Mackey Street intersection to help address heavy demand in the Palmdale area.

“We have spent $42 million on brand new 2G and 4G networks in the last 18 months, totally replacing our obsolete mobile network,” said Marlon Johnson, BTC’s senior vice-president of marketing and communications.

“With this new network, we have seen - over the last 12 months – growth in mobile voice traffic of some 60 per cent, and growth in data traffic of some astounding 27,000 perc ent with the introduction of the 4G network. The number of mobile calls on the BTC network has gone up from 2.6 million calls per day to around 3.1 million calls – a growth of some 500,000 calls per day on the new network. These growth numbers surpassed even our ambitious targets for cellular use.

“What those robust numbers have shown BTC is that the pent-up demand for both voice and data was extraordinary. Naturally, this is a welcome development for BTC, but it has led to voice and data congestion is some areas of New Providence. These new cellular towers will help alleviate much of this congestion and provide even better data and voice services to our mobile customers”.

BTC has also made modifications to existing cellular radio and equipment to address “call issues” areas along Bay Street/the JFK Connector Road, the Westridge area, the Cable Beach strip near the Bahamas Development Bank, the Eastern Road near Blair Estates, and the Sir Milo Butler Highway. These are designed to fix many of the chronic call disruptions that some customers now face, given the rapid increase in call volumes and mobile Internet use.

BTC’s cellular customers will also soon have access to even faster data speeds with the introduction of LTE – Long Term Evolution. Already in the testing phase, this next generation of high speed data will allow some customers access to speeds four times’ faster than 4G. The LTE network is expected to come on stream in late 2013.