TelEm Group technicians and engineers are working with their counterparts in Miami, Florida, USA, to restore broadband services to St. Maarten following a break in normal fiber cable connections from 1:00 am Saturday morning.
As of noon Saturday, it was being estimated that it would take until 3:00 Saturday afternoon for connections to be restored and normal service resumed.
According to Chief Technical Officer (CTO), Mr. Eldert Louisa, two internet links via Miami are down, however a third link remains operational, providing Facebook and Whatsapp access to TelEm Group customers.
“Customers can expect their internet service to be running slow and erratic until the problem is resolved,” said Mr. Louisa.
He said the problem is out of the company’s direct control, however TelEm Group’s own technicians and engineers are providing support in any way they can to ensure a smooth restoration of service from this end, once the Miami-based problem is fully resolved. Meantime TelEm Group explored several ways of temporarily increase its local bandwidth capacity with the assistance of other carriers, including carrier partners on French St. Martin. The TelEm Group technicians and engineers are also re-routing internet traffic to further assist with network congestion caused by the outage.
“As usual we will continue to monitor the ISP network for performance once we get the word that things are back to normal so that we can make any tweaks necessary to provide our customers with the best internet user experience once again,” said the CTO.
Mr. Louisa appealed to affected customers for patience and understanding and meantime apologized for any inconvenience caused.