Bahamas Suffers Major Disruption in Phone Service - Cause Not Identified

(Nassau, Bahamas) - BTC,  with over 300,000 cell phone customers and the vast majority of land-line customers in the Bahamas, suffered a crippling failure on Friday August 6th, that left much of the country without phone service.

The failure affected essential and non essential services, with uncalculated costs.

About mid-afternoon, BTC's (The Bahamas Telecommunications Company Ltd.) Acting President & CEO, Mr. I. Kirk Griffin held a press conference where he was able to update the country on the efforts being taken to restore service, and while he was able to identify the location of the problem he did not offer and reason for the occurrence.

An issued statement, read as follows:

"Friday, August 6, 2010. Nassau, Bahamas. During the early hours this morning, BTC suffered significant network failure on its prepaid cellular, SMS Platforms and some landline exchanges. The Company also experienced major difficulties with its International Roaming Services. As a result, customers throughout the country were unable to use their prepaid cellular phones, make or receive landline phone calls. In addition pre-paid and post-paid cellular services were also affected. Our systems alerted us immediately on the network failure, and since then all of our technical resources have been entrenched in working to ensure that services are restored as soon as possible.

Since this morning, we have seen some signs of restoration with our landline service and we can confirm that all landline, SMS and international roaming service have been restored as of 2:45pm. The prepaid network is being restored gradually. Our technical teams are still working to confirm the cause of the outage, will continue trouble shooting efforts to ensure that this outage does not reoccur.

In its history BTC has never experienced such an outage. In the upcoming days the Company will issue a statement outlining the cause of this outage and compensation to our customers."