The Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority has fined the Bahamas Telecommunications Company Limited (BTC) $1.5 million for breaching its Individual Operating License (IOL) in March 2014.
The Company had 30 days from December 18 to pay the fine without penalty.
On March 20, 2015, URCA announced that it had issued a final determination in its investigation of BTC's March 22, 2014 unplanned network outage, which resulted in significant interruption and disruption to the landline and mobile services provided by BTC to the majority of its customers across The Bahamas.
"This resulted in loss of service or severe service disruption to customers for periods of up to 15 hours. The final determination and order sets out the findings and conclusions of URCA's investigation of the circumstances leading up to the outage, as well as the remedies which URCA has imposed on BTC," URCA said in a press release announcing the determination.
Citing confidentiality and commercial sensitivity of the information contained in URCA's final determination and order and germane to URCA's decisions, URCA explained that it had issued the document containing its final determination and order to BTC only, and would make public only certain "salient details."
Salient details
URCA determined that BTC breached the terms of its IOL by failing or refusing to take all reasonably practicable steps to maintain, to the greatest extent possible, the proper and effective functioning of the public telephone network provided by BTC at all times, and further, failing or refusing to comply with URCA's final determination and order issued to BTC on March 7, 2013 which required BTC to take certain specific remedial and maintenance actions in relation to its networks (consequent to BTC's June 2012 outage).
The authority placed certain requirements on BTC, including a demand that BTC undertake various actions to implement adequate various redundancies, resiliencies and contingencies in its network to effectively remove all major weakness and vulnerability in its network; introduce and systematically conduct preventative maintenance measures on its network as identified in the order, and submit to URCA a pre-determined schedule for same; introduce and systematically perform testing on certain network elements as identified in the order, and submit to URCA a pre-determined schedule for same; submit a report to URCA providing further and better particulars regarding the compensation already given by BTC to consumers impacted by the March 2014 network outage; and, pay a fine in the amount of $1,581,384.61, such fine to be paid within thirty (30) days of URCA's order and in a manner to be directed by URCA.
BTC's response
In its own press release yesterday, BTC noted that it had launched its own investigation, and discovered that the outage was due solely to a failure in BTCs back-up power system. According to BTC, the problem has since been rectified.
BTC reported that it had begun improvements to its power plant in April 2014. Those works are 95 percent completed with an expected completion date of March 31, 2015.
CEO Leon Williams said, "Since the incident a year ago we've worked with URCA to meet their requirements and have implemented adequate redundancies, resilience and contingencies in our network to effectively remove all major weaknesses and vulnerabilities."
Mr. Leon Williams continued, saying that they are reviewing the URCA report for any other ways that BTC can make further improvements to the networks and systems.
Click here to read more at The Nassau Guardian
