From the early afternoon yesterday, Digicel customers across central and south Trinidad have been without Digicel+ and mobile services due to a “major fibre break.”
According to Colin Greaves, Digicel Group’s Head of Public Relations, the fibre break occurred on Chan Ramlal Road, Endeavour, near Digi Lane.
Greaves confirmed the service break was caused by a vehicle strike, where a large vehicle pulled down overhead wires. He explained, “Most outages are caused by fibre breaks (which are) caused by vehicle strikes or external parties.”
During the initial hours of the outage, customers took to social media to complain. On Facebook, Shenelle Seepersad said, “Disruption? The service is completely down. You all lost a customer.”
On X, formerly Twitter, a DJ and presenter on WACK 90.1 FM said, “I now walked into C3 and saw the Digicel store closing its doors and telling persons, ‘we don’t know what’s going on, but we don’t have connectivity so we’re closing’.”
President of the Greater San Fernando Area Chamber of Commerce Kiran Singh said store closures across San Fernando were common yesterday afternoon, “We have had several businesses that would have had no choice but to close early due to the lack of connectivity and being able to close business transactions as a result of sales.”
Singh added that while he did not have a confirmed figure on the number of affected businesses, he was frustrated that it took hours for any notice about the cause of the outage or that it had occurred.
“Being a secondary provider of telecommunications in the country, and a major provider at that, we would have expected some pronouncement ever made as to what is the problem,” Singh said.
However, Digicel’s Public Relations Head Colin Greaves clarified that Digicel had triggered its customer communications so that affected customers would receive updates from the company straight to their devices, Digicel social media, and traditional media channels.
Greaves could not give the number of customers affected, as he explained, “It’s a bit tricky as people are in transit and will connect to various cell sites on their commute to and from the affected areas.”
Digicel customers continued venting their frustrations on social media through the afternoon, calling for reimbursement and rebates. These lamentations were not left unheard. Greaves said, “It’s important to note that affected customers on short-duration plans will be appropriately rebated, and we will provide an update on that later when the service is fully restored.” In a later statement, Digicel said applicable compensation would be applied to customers’ accounts.
Greaves added, “We have a really great repair team that mobilises pretty quickly and gets out to the locations to repair the cables.” Multiple trucks remained on Digi Lane and Chan Ramlal Road in Endeavour, repairing the downed fibre optic lines into the sunset yesterday evening.
