The Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) was last night hit with a $1.581 million fine for last March’s network outage, the sector regulator finding it did not take action to maintain a “functioning” communications system.

The Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority (URCA), in a ruling on the March 22, 2014, outage that plagued landline and mobile services to most of BTC’s customers for up to 15 hours, said the carrier had breached several conditions in its operating licence.

URCA found BTC guilty of “failing, or refusing to take, all reasonably practicable steps to maintain, to the greatest extent possible, the proper and effective functioning of the public telephone network”.

It added that the privatised carrier, which is controlled by Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC), also “failed or refused to comply” an earlier order issued by URCA on March 7, 2013. That related to necessary maintenance action stemming from an earlier BTC outage in June 2012.

Recalling what had happened, URCA noted: “On March 25, 2014, BTC notified URCA that BTC had experienced an unplanned network outage starting at approximately 1am on March 22, 2014, which resulted in significant interruption and disruption to the landline and mobile services provided by BTC to the majority of its customers across the Bahamas.

“This resulted in loss of service or severe service disruption to customers for periods of up to 15 hours.”

As punishment, URCA has ordered BTC to “undertake various actions to implement adequate redundancies, resiliencies and contingencies in its network to effectively remove all major weakness and vulnerability in its network”.

The carrier is required to “introduce and systematically conduct preventative maintenance measures on its network”, and “introduce and systematically perform testing on certain network elements as identified in the Order,”.

It must also provide a report to URCA giving “further and better particulars regarding the compensation already given by BTC to consumers impacted by the March 2014 network outage”.

The fine has to be paid within 30 days.