The company announced last Thursday that plans are steadily in motion to initially introduce prepaid (QuikCell) service on its new GSM cellular network, which is presently planned for late December of this year in New Providence and Grand Bahama, with post-paid cellular scheduled for early 2004.
According to Leon Williams, Senior Vice-President and Chief Operations Officer at BTC, “The entire GSM project undertaken by BTC in order to improve the present level of cellular service for our numerous customers, is without a doubt, massive in its magnitude and complexity, requiring tremendous man hours from an entire slew of professionals, dedicated to network design, fiber cables installation, location procurement and construction of numerous towers throughout New Providence and The Family Islands, as well as purchasing of all equipment and identifying and implementing a new billing system for the network, among a variety of other things.”
With this in mind, BTC’s GSM team is steadily progressing with the installation arid pretesting of crucial equipment. To date, with the assistance of NorTel Networks, BTC’s chosen partner for this project, the GSM Cellular switch, which is the major link for the network that controls the flow of all data including voice, short messaging service (SMS) etc is 100 per cent commissioned. In addition, a number of Digital Trunk Controllers (OTC’s) primarily responsible for connecting remote cellular sites to the switch have also been successfully installed.
Mr. Williams added, “Essentially, BTC is planning to use this first launch to further test and validate the entire system, in order to ensure that all aspects of the network meet our requirements and those of our customers. We want to be certain that our cellular subscriber’s initial experience with the vast capabilities of a GSM network is nothing short of amazing, once this entire project is completed.
As a result, extensive testing for the company’s billing system will be undertaken over the next few months to ensure the generating of accurate bills, as well as testing of various features and extensive evaluation and confirmation of a number of roaming agreements with various regional telecommunications providers.”
By initially launching pre-paid cellular service, BTC will in fact be able to lift the present moratorium on cellular phones in the family islands, and provide those customers with postpaid arid pre-paid cellular service, As a result, the present congestion being experienced by most wireless customers will be significantly reduced with the expected migration of thousands of QuikCell customers from the present TDMA network to the new GSM network.
BTC intends to make the entire migration process effortless and pain free for its customers, who will only be required to complete a migration request form, purchase a GSM phone from BTC or its authorised dealers that meets all of the GSM network requirements before they are provided with an activated SIM card to begin service.
By Martella Matthews, The Nassau Guardian
