About 120,000 Bahamas Telecommunications Company Limited (BTC) subscribers to the GSM Rockit pre-paid service were shut down for hours yesterday, after an overnight upgrade failed to reboot Wednesday morning.
BTC Vice President of Network Services, Dale Knowles, said hours after the work began, maintenance crews started experiencing major network problems and GSM users throughout the country were disconnected.
“We were going through a process of upgrading the network and last night, we dealt with one of the major transitions on the network as we move to the final stage,” he explained.
“And as a result of that activity, we had some issues with some of the services. The prepaid platform was not staying stable.
“It would stay up for couple of hours, then it would shut down and we had to keep working on it to bring it back up and try to find out what was causing it.
“We started the upgrades around 11:00 Tuesday night and so we started to experience some problems around 3:00 am or in the mid-early morning.”
Mr Knowles said this upgrade came sooner than expected, as the GSM prepaid service has developed faster than they originally expected. He added that the platform was initially designed to service 80,000 customers, but today, over 100,000 Bahamians are on the network.
The BTC executive also said that GSM prepaid subscribers should brace themselves for more disruptions, as the company plans continuous upgrades.
“We are expanding the capacity of the network, so that we can move from the 80,000 that the original network was designed to accommodate to 250,000 subscribers,” he said.
“And we’re doing this earlier than we had anticipated because of the growth that we have experienced. Once we’re finished with this upgrade, then other ones will be scheduled, and so the public is advised that there might be more disruptions.”
Calls to and from the service all failed yesterday, as the network was still down. Customers also tried using the text messaging service as an alternative, but several messages didn’t go through or some of them were returned by the operator.
By IANTHIA SMITH Guardian Staff Reporter
