POND ISLAND:--- TelEm Group's mobile provider TelCell, has apologized to prepaid customers for a prolonged interruption in service Saturday.
TelCell prepaid customers were left without service shortly after midnight Saturday when a card located on the pre-paid switch failed and a backup unit also failed to take up the load of the faulty card.
With the assistance of equipment vendors working remotely from the USA, TelEm Group technicians and engineers went through various troubleshooting exercises and were able to identify the problem with the backup unit and also were able to replace the faulty equipment part.
The service was restored at 2:23pm Saturday afternoon after rebooting and reconfiguration. Once back online, TelCell sent an SMS message to customers informing them of the outage and apologizing for the interruption in service.
Manager, Mobile Networks, Mr. Julien Lake, said the interruption was caused by a "freak coincidence" of failures affecting first the primary switch and the backup unit that is designed to provide redundancy to the primary switch.
"The chance of a recurrence of a double failure of equipment such as this is very, very slim," assured Mr. Lake.
Chief Technical Officer (CTO) Mr. Eldert Louisa said a full report about the double failure will be compiled and discussed with the equipment vendor with a view to providing a quicker response should a similar failure occur in the future.
"We are taking this outage very seriously because of the number of customers who were affected and I would personally like to apologize to all customers affected for any inconvenience caused," said Mr. Louisa.
TELEM Press Release
