Rishard Khan

Re­porter

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Reg­u­lar life in T&T was dis­rupt­ed af­ter TSTT’s net­work went down ear­ly yes­ter­day, com­pro­mis­ing land­line, mo­bile and in­ter­net ser­vices on and to the net­work.

From as ear­ly as 6.30 am, thou­sands of peo­ple around the coun­try ex­pe­ri­enced dif­fi­cul­ties mak­ing calls on the net­work and those try­ing to make calls to TSTT lines from oth­er providers were al­so un­able to do so.

While the ef­fects were ex­pe­ri­enced across both Trinidad and To­ba­go, Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands the heav­i­est con­cen­tra­tion of is­sues cen­tred around the Port-of-Spain area.

This meant that busi­ness­es were al­so af­fect­ed. Some gro­ceries re­port­ed that pay­ing through a ma­chine via deb­it and cred­it cards was ei­ther slow or not work­ing at all.

De­spite this, Su­per­mar­ket As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent, Ra­jiv Diptee, said the sec­tor did not grind to a halt.

“It’s not to say that it’s a com­plete black­out. We are still able to com­mu­ni­cate via What­sApp via mes­sages, some of us are able to com­mu­ni­cate based on which net­works we’re on,” he said.

“The re­al­i­ty is that we are still able to have some lev­el of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Ob­vi­ous­ly, there is a con­cern if we need es­sen­tial ser­vices, fire, am­bu­lance, po­lice, et cetera but for the most part I have not got­ten any dire re­ports of any­thing that has, in essence, crip­pled op­er­a­tions.”

Down­town Own­ers and Mer­chants As­so­ci­a­tion (DO­MA) pres­i­dent Gre­go­ry Aboud not­ed that there were dis­rup­tions to some busi­ness op­er­a­tions but did not an­tic­i­pate that there would be any ma­jor im­pacts.

“We did not re­ceive any re­port of se­vere com­plaint so we make the as­sump­tion that peo­ple have been cop­ing. Ob­vi­ous­ly, there is a sec­ondary ser­vice avail­able through Dig­i­cel and this is one of the rea­sons why, you know, com­pe­ti­tion in the mar­ket­place is such a good thing for the con­sumer,” he said.

The Min­istry of Works and Trans­port al­so re­leased a state­ment on its Face­book not­ing some dis­rup­tion.

“All Li­cens­ing lo­ca­tions are cur­rent­ly ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a tem­po­rary dis­rup­tion in the de­liv­ery of its ser­vices due to in­ter­net chal­lenges be­ing ex­pe­ri­enced is­land­wide,” the min­istry said.

A video was al­so shared on so­cial me­dia show­ing cars lined up out­side the Ca­roni Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion of­fice, with frus­trat­ed dri­vers who were hop­ing to con­duct busi­ness but un­able to do so.

First Cit­i­zens bank al­so re­port­ed that its cus­tomer care hot­line was af­fect­ed.

In an up­date on the sit­u­a­tion, TSTT CEO Lisa Agard said by mid­day the is­sues on its net­work were rec­ti­fied and of­fered cus­tomers free da­ta un­til mid­night as part of the com­pa­ny’s apol­o­gy for the in­con­ve­nience.

In a voice note, Agard said the “iso­lat­ed” dis­rup­tion to ser­vices in parts of T&T was rec­ti­fied by 11 am.

“We im­me­di­ate­ly dis­patched our in­ter­nal en­gi­neers as well as en­gi­neers from our ven­dors and we were able to iso­late and fix the prob­lem,” Agard said.

De­spite this, some mem­bers of the pub­lic in Port-of-Spain told Guardian Me­dia they were still ex­pe­ri­enc­ing is­sues with mak­ing calls well af­ter mid­day. Up to last evening, Guardian Me­dia was un­able to place calls to any of the emer­gency ser­vices while us­ing an­oth­er net­work.

While not go­ing in­to any spe­cif­ic de­tails, Agard said the drop-in ser­vice was trig­gered by an “un­ex­pect­ed” prob­lem which she ad­mit­ted should not have re­sult­ed in such a wide­spread is­sue.

“We ac­knowl­edge and deeply apol­o­gise for the im­pact this dis­rup­tion had on our cus­tomers’ con­nec­tiv­i­ty and your dai­ly rou­tines. This in­ci­dent stands as an iso­lat­ed oc­cur­rence which ought not to have hap­pened be­cause of the sev­er­al back­up plans that we have in place,” she said.

“We thank our cus­tomers for their pa­tience and con­tin­ued sup­port. To demon­strate our re­gret, we’ve de­cid­ed that all cus­tomers will be giv­en free da­ta for the rest of the day un­til mid­night tonight. Thank you for your pa­tience.”

For­mer Point Fortin May­or Ab­don Ma­son told Guardian Me­dia he be­lieved TSTT un­der­es­ti­mat­ed the time it would take to re­solve the is­sue.

“It is chal­leng­ing for me now be­cause I live in Point Fortin, work in Port-of-Spain and I usu­al­ly main­tain con­tact with a num­ber of in­di­vid­u­als through­out the day by phone and I have not been able to so do,” he said.

“Some of these things are er­rors and man might es­ti­mate the amount of time it will take to cor­rect but then when they get there they might re­alise it’s more dif­fi­cult than an­tic­i­pat­ed,” he said.

Oth­ers, like Wade Charles, said while his mo­bile phone was on the TSTT net­work, he was able to work around the dis­rup­tion.

“I didn’t call any­body nor­mal. I was us­ing What­sApp and I had no prob­lem ... I does use What­sApp more. I may make a call now and then but I does more use What­sApp,” he said.

On so­cial me­dia, how­ev­er, peo­ple were less for­giv­ing. Com­ment­ing un­der the up­date on CNC3 News’ Face­book page, Natasha Bo­horie said, “Free da­ta, that’s the best you all can do. What about com­pa­nies and busi­ness that lost a lot be­cause of you all.”

Up un­til 5 pm, Bradley Ra­moutar said, there were still con­nec­tiv­i­ty prob­lems.

Cit­ing the is­sues cre­at­ed to con­tact emer­gency ser­vices, Troy James de­scribed the in­ci­dent as a na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty risk.

Just over a year ago, TSTT ex­pe­ri­enced a na­tion­wide out­age af­ter thieves made off with or dam­aged $1 mil­lion of crit­i­cal fi­bre op­tic ca­bles in south Trinidad, crip­pling their ser­vice.