A major fault in one of the Bahamas Telecommunications Company’s (BTC) cables in the East Street South area has caused service disruptions for customers in that area.

In fact, landline and internet services were disrupted from early yesterday with disruptions expected to last until late this evening.

BTC Senior Manager of Public Relations Jerome Sawyer told the Bahama Journal last evening that the fault occurred due to excessive rain and flooding over the past few days.

“As a result, landline subscribers in the East Street South area with telephone numbers beginning with 322, 323, 325, 356, 326 and 328 are without landline and internet service,” Mr. Sawyer said in a release late yesterday afternoon.

The BTC executive said BTC technicians are working to restore services to those subscribers and apologised for the inconvenience.

Network upgrades and the transition to a new billing system have caused a number of problems for BTC mobile and data customers.

Brand and Communications Vice President Marlon Johnson said recently that mobile phone users will continue to experience interruptions in their services for at least another month as BTC continues work towards improving its overall infrastructure network.

Some weeks ago BTC received a number of complaints from customers complaining of dropped calls, interruptions with text messaging and their inability to use the Star 44 function.

Mr. Johnson said the problem occurred as the company was upgrading its GSM network.

BTC has begun extensive work to upgrade its network and Mr. Johnson said that while customers will be inconvenienced over the next few weeks, in the long run they will be happy with the end result.

Mr. Johnson also suggested that BTC may be offering customers some form of reimbursement for the disruptions they will face starting this month.

“The good news,” he said, “is that starting in June we’re going to look at changing the text platform and the pre-paid billing platform and then we’ll continue to change from that. We will change our 2G network to coincide with our 4G network.”