By CELESTE NIXON

Tribune Staff Reporter



BTC will consider various options in a bid to compensate customers that were affected by the nation-wide disruption in service, which CEO Geoff Houston said was the worst crash of his 25 years in the industry.

Only a few days after promising there would be no more large interruptions, BTC called a press conference yesterday to apologise and say the company recognises it will be a challenge to recover the faith and confidence of its customers, but said they are “absolutely committed” to the modernisation of BTC and will be exploring all forms of compensation.

Mr Houston said: “We are looking at all options to ensure that we actually give back to our customers.

“We do recognise the pain that our customers are going through – we are going to take stock and decide how to move forward with our customers in terms of compensation and any other promotions.”

The morning outage that disabled BTC services throughout the Bahamas for hours yesterday had nothing to do with the upgrades to the network, Mr Houston said.

He added that while it is too early to determine the actual cause of the event, the matter will be investigated and all measures, including investing further in the network if necessary, will be taken to avoid another outage.

Mr Houston said: "We are working hard to upgrade all of our core infrastructure, we are working very hard to bring what we consider a much better network experience to all customers certainly events like this don't help us.

“This I can say from my 25 plus years in the industry an outage of this magnitude is the most significant I have ever experienced and certainly it is questioning a lot, in terms of our network, and what we need to do to continue to fix our underlying issues.

“This is not a good day for BTC, this is another one of those experiences where I think we have a lot to learn.

“We are going to learn very quickly from this exercise and we are going to learn very quickly from whatever the investigation throws up and we are going to do whatever we can to make sure it does not happen again.”

According to Antonio Stubbs, senior vice-president of technical services, some 350,000 pre-paid and post paid customers were affected by the interruption in service.

He said up to yesterday afternoon the corporation was still in restoration mode, with broadband services coming back online late yesterday morning and hoping to have enterprise customers restored by late afternoon and all services running normally today.

While the corporation has yet to speak with BEC, Mr Stubbs said they will be reviewing BTC network and power system and making sure that the new generation network, which will be installed over the next few months, is equipped with the proper resiliency to ensure that mass outage will not be repeated.

"Hopefully in the very near future we won't see these type of outages in our network,” he said.

Story courtesy of Tribune 242