MINISTER of National Security Wayne Munroe joined wife of the Prime Minister and Office of the Spouse representative Ann Marie Davis and Aliv CEO John Gomez at the testing of the MARCO’s Alert cellphone component, at Aliv’s Corporate Office yesterday. Manager responsible for wireless engineering for Aliv and Cable Bahamas Julian Dean conducted the test alert, and several Government and Aliv stakeholders were also present. (BIS Photo: Eric Rose)
MINISTER of National Security Wayne Munroe and Ann-Marie Davis, wife of the prime minister, attended a test event for the MARCO Alert system at ALIV yesterday.
The successful test was sent on the ALIV network, with Mr Munroe and Mrs Davis both receiving the alert on their cell phones yesterday.
“I’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” Mrs Davis, of the Office of the Spouse, said at yesterday’s event, I think maybe seven or eight years, ever since young Marco Archer was found brutalised and killed.
“. . .To know that he wasn’t the first that it happened to, I wanted to see this system in place to stop something like that (from) ever happening again.”
She said she thinks the alert system will be a significant tool in the fight against violence against children.
The test message read “This is MARCO’s Alert from the Office of the Spouse of the Prime Minister.”
The system will allow authorities to send out an alert in the case of an emergency or missing child using geomapping technology, meaning anyone in a certain radius will get the message.
Mr Munroe said he hopes the system will be fully up and running by the end of this month.
Yesterday, BTC CEO Andre Foster said the telecommunications company is looking forward to meeting with Mr Munroe and his team today. This comes after Mr Munroe criticised BTC last week for not being ready to roll out the alert system on its network.
“BTC is pleased to see that the government has completed its initial test of the MARCO’s Alert SMS system. We look forward to meeting with Wayne Munroe, Minister of National Security, and his team tomorrow, November 18, to discuss how BTC will support this very important project as we determine the next steps for our testing and implementation of the system.
“The ability to provide SMS alerts in the unfortunate event that a child goes missing is extremely important and we are committed to working with the government to provide this service across the Bahamas.
“We will provide a detailed update following tomorrow’s discussions,” Mr Foster said in a statement.
Comments
TalRussell 2 years, 11 months ago
Think about how the Gun Shot Fired detection system's alarm control panel, must've been lighting up like a Christmas tree on Halloween night and what make of each the million dollars spent on brungin' to equipped out and operate the control room is necessary to maintain that sweetheart of a baby, ― Yes?
ThisIsOurs 2 years, 11 months ago
Im still baffled as to how all of this work could have been done, contracts signed, Dames and Minnis on multiple PR junkets, millions handed over and nobody thought to check if the system could work on the communication highway? The most troubling part of this is noone has even highlighted it. People are looking at BTC as a villian for not having the interface ready. But this is a serious breech of a procurement process not to do a feasibility study before you decide on a vendor. This system should have been rejected outright until BTC confirmed that all issues were resolved
The weird thing is, this is exactly what they did with Prospect Ridge. Spent all kinds of money but took no pains to determine if there was a foundation.
As long as Bahamians fail to pick up on things like this it wont matter what we call ourselves, local govt, Republic etc
tribanon 2 years, 11 months ago
LMAO
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