Gail Alexan­der

Gov­ern­ment is hold­ing dis­cus­sions with ca­ble ser­vice providers re­gard­ing their con­nec­tiv­i­ty risk and is do­ing its own checks to find the best so­lu­tion af­ter Mon­day’s out­age of ser­vices, says Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion Min­is­ter Allyson West.

“Since we re­ly on in­ter­na­tion­al ser­vices it’s dif­fi­cult for us to elim­i­nate prob­lems but we’ll do what we can make the sys­tem as ro­bust as pos­si­ble,” West added in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day.

She was re­ply­ing to In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tor Paul Richards’ queries on Mon­day’s prob­lems were in­ter­net, and some cell­phone and ca­ble trans­mis­sions were af­fect­ed due to un­der-sea ca­ble dam­age. Ser­vice re­turned to nor­mal that af­ter­noon.

West con­firmed an over­all as­sess­ment is be­ing done of the sit­u­a­tion to pre­vent re­cur­rence. She said what oc­curred on Mon­day was “A bit of Mur­phy’s Law.”

She said T&T has a sub-sea ca­ble com­ing through the An­tigua chan­nel to T&T as a source of con­nec­tiv­i­ty and that ex­pe­ri­enced dif­fi­cul­ty last Tues­day.

While in the process of re­pair­ing that - which took longer due to COVID re­stric­tions and dif­fi­cul­ty with trav­el­ling - an­oth­er ca­ble from Cu­ra­cao al­so ex­pe­ri­enced a pow­er out­age “And that is what caused the prob­lem we ex­pe­ri­enced.”

When the ini­tial break on the An­tigua ca­ble oc­curred last week there was no ob­vi­ous pow­er loss as the Cu­ra­cao ca­ble sys­tem worked well.

But in the “Mur­phy’s Law” sit­u­a­tion that oc­curred, the Cu­ra­cao ca­ble and the one in the An­tigua chan­nel were both af­fect­ed at the same time.

West said two of the three ca­ble providers were more di­rect­ly af­fect­ed as they have greater con­cen­tra­tion of their con­nec­tiv­i­ty com­ing from the af­fect­ed ca­bles. The third wasn’t as sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­pact­ed as its con­nec­tiv­i­ty was “more even­ly” spread.

“While TATT doesn’t reg­u­late ac­cess to con­nec­tiv­i­ty, we can and in­tend to have dis­cus­sions ser­vice providers re­gard­ing sources from where they re­ceive their con­nec­tions.”

West dis­count­ed that there was risk to med­ical ser­vices’ in­for­ma­tion since she said Gov­ern­ment’s ICT sys­tems in the health sec­tor are pro­tect­ed, "In­for­ma­tion wasn’t at risk but the is­sue (on Mon­day) was peo­ple get­ting pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.”

She said the out­age was al­so ex­pe­ri­enced by the East­ern Caribbean.

20,000 more de­vices or­dered for stu­dents

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly, re­spond­ing to UNC Sen­a­tor Wade Mark's queries, said Gov­ern­ment is procur­ing 20,000 more de­vices for stu­dents us­ing on­line teach­ing ser­vices and 15,000 oth­ers are be­ing pledged.

The Min­istry had as­sessed that a to­tal of 65,000 need­ed de­vices So far 17,000 were dis­trib­uted.

Checks are on to as­cer­tain the ex­act num­ber of how many more are need­ed af­ter as­sess­ing how many were bought by par­ents and pro­vid­ed by donors.