Batelco Strives to Ensure Connectivity

Batelco’s engineers in Bahrain implemented emergency plans to rapidly restore internet capacity to key destinations without delay following a cable cut incident 170 Km off the coast of Dubai, on Friday 26th February.

Batelco Group General Manager Media & Government Relations Ahmed Al Janahi explained that the Cable cut threatened to cause severe disruption to communications in the region including Bahrain.

“However, as we have stringent plans in place to deal with such situations, we were able to divert traffic and restore the majority of services for most of our customers within a few hours. A small number of our customers have been impacted and continue to experienced disruption to their services,” he said.

“As soon as we became aware of the cable cut, our engineers at Batelco’s 24x7 Network Operations Centre (NOC) instantly began their well rehearsed action plans and started re-routing internet, voice and data traffic to other cable systems to alleviate congestion and restore services.”

“Repair work is currently in progress, under the direction of the cable owners, to restore the damaged cable. It is expected that full services will be restored by March 6th,” said Mr. Al Janahi.

“All our network engineers and other specialists have been on full alert and available to assist since the incident took place and they continue to monitor the situation from our NOC, around the clock.”

Batelco’s NOC, at an investment of $1 million, provides a world class facility from where Batelco’s skilled engineers and technical teams can monitor all services for their customers, around the clock every day of the year.

“Any degradation in any of our provisioning is noticed instantly, giving us the edge in rectifying any issue, in many cases before it becomes a problem for our customers,” said Batelco’s Chief Technical Officer Ebrahim Zainal.

“Several Gulf countries besides Bahrain are affected by the damage to the crucial cable. However, as a result of Batelco’s multi-million dollar investments in multiple cable systems with significant diversity, expert network planning and extremely responsive restoration initiatives, Bahrain has been protected to a large extent from experiencing a severe disconnection with the rest of the world,” Mr. Zainal elaborated.

“Quality of service is a key priority for Batelco and a big differentiator in a very competitive market,” Mr. Al Janahi continued.

“We apologise to any of our customers who have been inconvenienced and continue to be affected by the cable cut, which is outside the control of Batelco. We assure all our customers that Batelco continues to monitor the situation while the repair work takes place,” he concluded.