PHILIPSBURG – The President of the St. Maarten Chamber of Commerce and Industry (COCI) visited the two main telecommunications service providers UTS and TelEm Group as a follow up to the meeting held in December 2016.
The interruption of service, due to a cable break, affected the entire community of St. Maarten, and COCI deemed it necessary to meet with both parties on this matter. During the December meeting, both providers expressed their commitment to the restoration of service and the attainment of redundancy routes, so that complete failures in service through cable breaks could be mitigated as much as possible. The promise made to secure alternate routes for telecommunications traffic from and to St. Maarten was kept.
The providers briefed the President of COCI on the acquired/secured redundancy routes and have now in place adequate alternative routes in the event anyone’s route should fail. Through these measures stability will be returned in the provisioning of telecommunications services in St. Maarten.
COCI has indicated that once a full restoration of the SMPR-1 is achieved and all routes available are fully functional its focus shall shift on the quality of service. The providers have made substantial investments in their networks and have acquired the required capacity for the further enhancement of their services. Whilst the restoration may seem a bit slow, and the consumers are still affected, all measures have been taken and are being taken to not only achieve stability of service provisioning, but also the highest level of service offering.
The providers are committed to have the confidence in their products restored. COCI applauds the initiatives taken, the cooperation extended between providers, and the investments made by the providers. COCI will continue to monitor the progress of the service providers and will maintain the pressure to ensure that the community receives the quality of service we all know the providers are capable of.
COCI expressed gratitude to the community for its patience and understanding, and for the manner in which it continues through intermittent periods of internet/telephony failures.
