B.T.L. switch failure results in twelve hour call blackout

If you tried unsuccessfully to make an international call or fax on Wednesday afternoon don’t feel bad: you weren’t alone. From around midday the Belize Telecommunications Limited’s international direct dial service went down and didn’t come back until twelve hours later. Today I spoke to Karen Bevans, the company’s marketing and sales manager, who apologized for any inconvenience and promised that all efforts will be made to avoid similar problems in the future.

Karen Bevans, General Manager, Marketing and Sales

“We had a problem where our customers were unable to process direct dial calls and collect calls. Basically we have an electronic switch which is our gateway switch in Belmopan that processes all our international calls and the switch went down on us. A little after midday we got alarms that the switch is down. Luckily and fortunately we had a redundancy link where our customers had alternative route to use the option to process calls through our operators.”

Q: “What caused the system to go down?”

Karen Bevans

“We are still uncertain at this point. Our engineers were able to stabilize the switch sometime after midnight last night but we have the engineers from Lucent Technologies where we purchased the switch, coming in this morning to see what the problem was and to let us know how we could correct the problem for the future.”

This was not the first time the Belmopan switch has failed, as a similar incident occurred in May. It is not believed that the failure was associated with the computer changeover to the new century.