Pond Island:--- World Cup soccer fans seem to be “unfairly” blaming TelEm Group’s internet service for poor reception when viewing their favourite team’s progress in the ongoing World Cup soccer tournament in Russia.
Soccer fans on St. Maarten say they are trying to keep up with all the games at various bars, clubs, restaurants, and also at home – but many have complained that their viewing is being spoiled by lagging signals that can keep the game frozen for many minutes due to buffering.
“We want customers to know that our Internet service is not to blame for a great deal of the problems being experienced by many set-top TV box owners,” said TelEm Chief Commercial Officer, Mr. Brian Mingo.
He said the company’s Technical Department has looked into the matter following customer complaints, especially in the heat of a match.
Mr. Mingo says technicians have reported incredible spikes in internet use during the matches caused by an overload of persons who want to stream the games live from their set-top TV box provider.
“We can see that some of the boxes are able to deal with the higher demand because the servers used by these boxes are larger and afford more capacity for users around the world, including St. Maarten,” said TelEm Chief Technical Officer (CTO) Mr. Eldert Louisa.
Mr. Louisa is advising customers who are streaming the World Cup games and also experiencing reception issues to first check with their own service provider or vendor of the set-top box before throwing the blame on TelEm’s Internet service.
“Customers should understand that the Internet service they are provided with is for usual things such as browsing, e-mail, entertainment etc, and not as a substitute for TV or Cable TV, which many people are now using the Internet as a substitute for,” said Mr. Louisa.
“If everyone is demanding bandwidth to view the World Cup, not only does our network capacity get pushed to maximum use, but so does the capacity available at the gateway leading to the servers that provide steaming content for viewers on St. Maarten and elsewhere,” said Mr. Louisa.
Both Mr. Louisa and Mr. Mingo said customers with other services such as Netflix can do an easy test to verify that their World Cup streaming problems are being caused by another source and not by TelEm’s own internet service.
“If TelEm customers check Netflix and get a steady stream with good quality picture and signal then our service is working fine because Neflix is properly licensed to operate on our network, while any source from which the customer is streaming the World Cup match that might not be properly licensed or at least might offer only a limited capacity service could very well experience problems,” said the TelEm Group executives.
