TelEm Group has issued an apology to business and residential customers, as well as the
general public of St. Maarten, following Wednesday’s major outage of mobile and fixed
telecommunication services for several hours.
The company acknowledges that the interruption in service from approximately 4:00 p.m. until
approximately 12:30 am of the early hours Thursday morning, when service was finally restored,
affected customers island-wide. The company wishes to assure everyone that all steps were being taken
at the time of the outage to restore connections as quickly as possible.
The cause of the interruption was due to failure of a main backup power supply (UPS) system when
GEBE power located at the SMITCOMS building in Harbour View, also failed.
“The failure of both power systems meant a total loss of power to all equipment in the Smitcoms
building, resulting in loss of connectivity to both mobile and fixed networks,” said TelEm Group in a
prepared release explaining the outage to customers.
The company thanks the dedicated staff of engineers and technicians who turned out to restore power
to the network equipment and proceed with programming of the main and backup routers in use so
that customers could once again have telecommunication services.
According to TeEm Group CEO, Mr. Kendall Dupersoy, the reprogramming and reconfiguration of
equipment after such a major outage is critical and can take many hours to complete as programmers
need to ensure systems are corruption free when switched on again.
“We sincerely apologize to everyone who was affected by Wednesday night’s outage,” said Mr.
Dupersoy. The CEO says the company expects to have a permanent solution to the backup power
system failure at the SMITCOMS building as early as this coming weekend.
