THE Utilities Regulation & Competition Authority (URCA) last night confirmed it was investigating the June 18-19 network outages that hit the Bahamas Telecommunications Company's (BTC) fixed-line and cellular services, giving the carrier until July 9 to produce "a detailed report" on the affair.

Breaking its silence after repeated questions from the Bahamian public as to why it had not started to probe the outages, which some have alleged were sabotage, URCA said its investigation would be completed in early August - some four weeks after receiving the report from BTC.

The regulator said it had advised BTC it was undertaking the probe last Friday, and is focusing on two issues: Whether the newly-privatised carrier took all necessary measures to prevent the outage in the first place, and if it "took all reasonably practicable steps to restore the affected networks within the shortest timeframe possible" after the problems occurred.

"URCA has given BTC a July 9, 2012 deadline to provide a detailed report on the outage, including technical details of all points of failure, the impact of each failure on network activity and related services, and the time within which relevant personnel would have responded to these failures," the regulator said.

"The report must also outline the causes for the outage, detailed steps that would have been taken to restore functionality and specifications of preventative systems, and other safeguards against such occurrences, including procedural measures and related activity."

URCA added that it had also prohibited BTC from disposing of any documents, data, information and equipment related to the outages for a 90-day period.