Pond Island – TelEm Group is seeking an urgent meeting with uplink partner Cable & Wireless for a full account of Tuesday’s close to three hour internet outage that affected business and residential customers island-wide.
TelEm Group says this is the third time this year that its Miami, USA-based Cable & Wireless uplink partner has experienced an outage at their facility in Puerto Rico resulting in complete interruption to TelEm Group internet customers on St. Maarten for several hours.
“The company provides an uplink service that we totally rely on for continued service to our customers therefore it is vital that everything is put in place to ensure greater reliability of our international uplink,” said TelEm Group Chief Commercial Officer (CTO) Mr. Eldert Louisa late Tuesday night.
Mr. Louisa said although the outage did not last as long as the last outage in July this year, the fact however remains that there has been an outage at all after Cable & Wireless assured in July that it had taken steps to mitigate against future outages of this kind.
“We understand that the outage was caused by a failed card on Cable & Wireless equipment in Puerto Rico. Now that service has been restored, we have requested to speak with top management for a more detailed explanation of what happened and to determine what further steps they intend to make their service more reliable,” said Mr. Louisa and who has meantime apologized to those affected for inconvenience caused because of the 2:00 pm to 4:45 pm outage. He has also assured that TelEm Group management will continue to press the matter with Cable & Wireless in Miami starting with some urgent calls to management at the opening of office Wednesday.
