The Minister yesterday issued a press release, which noted that GT&T’s paid advertisement is ‘misleading’ and a ‘poor apology’.

According to the release, the advertisement claims that the disruptions are only affecting the prepaid cellular service, but in fact all cellular consumers have had to suffer the inconvenience of a loss, or poor quality of service.

“GT&T has once again let down consumers,” the release stated.

Nadir has noted that over the past year, the service has had three major failures. One was excused as an overburdened capacity and the second as a flooding at its headquarters at Telephone House. “Now we are told that the pre-paid cellular system has failed and the company cannot give a time frame for the restoration of the service,” the release stated.

As such, the release indicated that the Minister is calling on GT&T to get its act together.

On Wednesday last, the pre-paid platform of GT&T Cellular service experienced a system failure and, as a result, pre-paid customers were unable to access the network to make calls while retaining the capability to receive.

GT&T in a statement acknowledged that it was a massive failure and the Company sought the technical support of the supplier of the equipment in an around-the-clock attempt to restore service. Despite their best efforts, the phone company said the system remained down until late Saturday night.

It is necessary to point out that GT&T did take into consideration the frustration and inconvenience being suffered by its pre-paid customers, the statement said.

“On Friday evening, the Management of the Company, acting in the interest of those customers, took the decision and made the technical arrangements necessary to reroute the pre-paid traffic to provide service to these subscribers,” GT&T explained.

The phone company said it did so fully appreciating that these calls would be made free of cost, with the unavailability of the platform to record charges. The arrangement was made at a significant cost to the company, GT&T said.

Inevitably, once it was recognised that service was available to pre-paid customers and with no charge, there was an unusual volume of usage. The result was the unfortunate congestion of the network affecting the other cellular users.

With the correction of the system failure, the pre-paid platform has now been reestablished and normal service on GT&T’s Cellular Network has been restored, GT&T said.