Friday June 22, 2012, the Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority (URCA) advised the Bahamas Telecommunication Company Ltd (BTC) of the launch of its investigation into BTC’s actions regarding the June 18th and 19th network outages. The regulator advised that the investigation will address two core issues:
- Whether BTC took all reasonably practicable measures to prevent such network outages
- Upon the occurrence of the network outage, whether BTC took all reasonably practicable steps to restore the affected networks within the shortest time frame possible
The network outage affected both BTC’s fixed and mobile networks. URCA has given BTC a July 9, 2012 deadline to provide a detailed report on the outage, including technical details of all points of failure, the impact of each failure on network activity and related services, and the time within which relevant personnel would have responded to these failures. The report must also outline the causes for the outage, detailed steps that would have been taken to restore functionality and specifications of preventative systems and other safeguards against such occurrences, including procedural measures and related activity.
Referring to BTC’s operating responsibility regarding the “continuity of public telephone networks and carriage services”, URCA CEO, Kathleen Riviere-Smith underscored BTC’s obligation “to take all reasonably practicable steps to maintain, to the greatest extent possible, the proper and effective functioning of any public telephone network that it provides, at all times”. Riviere-Smith affirmed URCA’s commitment to ensuring an exhaustive investigation into the network outage. Such an investigation she said is fundamental to URCA’s mandate of representing the public’s best interests.
To read a complete copy of the release download the below linked PDF document.