NASSAU, BAHAMAS – Bahamas Telecommunication’s Company (BTC) executives said yesterday the company is “slightly ahead” of the curve on bandwidth demand, having increased network capacity by some 25 percent since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Andre Foster, the company’s senior director of technology operations, told Eyewitness News that the company was “doing all the right things” to ensure that those persons have a reliable and efficient network to work from home and the engage virtual learning platforms due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were slightly ahead of the curve as it relates to bandwidth demand. We did start to see an increase in usage of our services in late July early August,” Foster said.
“In the last 18 months we have made a lot of investment to ensure that we have a much more stable network. We have been moving customers to our fibre to the home footprint; from our legacy network to our state-of-the art fibre to the home network which provides a tremendous amount of additional bandwidth capacity to our subscribers.”
He continued: “We’re pleased that we are not seeing any high utilization that is causing any major congestion. We’re also in the process of re-balancing our network meaning, where our capacity demands may be starting to hit certain thresholds we will move that traffic over to other parts of the network where we have capacity headroom.
“Since the onset of the pandemic we added about 25 percent additional capacity and we have on order another 10 gigabytes of internet capacity. That’s servicing a combination of both our fixed and mobile networks. We are looking at another 15 percent over the current capacity. That is in the pipeline to delivered before the end of this year or sooner if the demand necessitates.”
Foster noted that the company continues to deploy its fibre to the home technology.
“We have also upgraded our copper networks in various areas throughout central new Providence to ensure we have a solid connection to households,” he said.
“Currently we sit in front of 40,000 homes with our fibre to the home footprint. We sit in front of another 10,000-12,000 with our upgraded DSL technology, so close to 50 percent of our homes have been upgraded
“Over 50 percent of the network on Grand Bahama is fibre to the home. On New Providence it’s probably around 30 percent of the homes. We’re probably nearing 50 percent of the archipelago being upgraded and every year our intention is to grow that penetration of new upgraded areas by double digits,” said Foster.
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