TelEm Group engineers, worked along with their Digicel counterparts throughout the Caribbean to trace and restore communication links between the companies two networks Monday.
A communication problem between TelEm Group and Digicel became apparent at the weekend, following a Caribbean-wide outage and subsequent reconnection to the network of a third carrier, Columbus Networks.
According to TelEm Group, the Columbus Network outage happened on Friday night and by Saturday, TelEm Group’s E1 Communication links with Columbus Networks and other carriers had been re-established and routine tests were carried out.
“We soon began receiving reports that callers from St. Maarten could not make international calls that were being terminated by the Digicel networks to various destinations in the Caribbean, even though these same networks and destinations were able to send traffic to callers on St. Maarten,” said Network Engineer, Donville Hodge.
He said calls to the following destinations were affected: Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica, Curacao, Martinique, Guadeloupe and French St. Martin.
According to Mr. Hodge, a team of engineers and technicians at TelEm Group were in constant contact with management of Digicel Curacao, who assigned their own team of telecommunication experts to address the problem and reestablish proper network links as soon as possible.
All links between the two networks were re-established at approximately 1.30 pm Monday after Digicel reset their own equipment (switching nodes) located in two neighbouring islands.
Mr. Hodge said the main contact was with Digicel in Curacao however, due to the nature of the problem, other Digicel network administrators in other locations were also involved in the final solution.
TelEm Group management has thanked their counterparts at Digicel Curacao, and Digicel Jamaica for their timely cooperation is resolving the international calling issue and also apologized to business and residential clients on St. Maarten connecting to the Digicel networks for the interruption in international service over the weekend and Monday morning.