TSTT has engineered most of the network to maintain service in adverse events including those triggered by loss of commercial power. This is part of TSTT’s disaster business contingency planning.

TSTT’s main network sites are equipped with standby generators which are fueled and maintained as part of TSTT’s regular Preventative Maintenance (PM’s) schedules. The generators kick in when commercial power is lost and have the capacity to provide 24hrs of run time powering our network equipment.

Additionally, most of our remote mobile sites are equipped with standby batteries engineered to provide at least 4 hours of reserve capacity in the event of a loss or interruption in commercial power. We currently have 610 locations with varying technologies, (2G,3G, and 4G). Some of those locations have back-up generators and some have battery back-up power.

While designed to last up to 4 hours, based on load, the back-up capability can be less. Given that the outage lasted over 4 hours, some of those locations went into outage and customers would have experienced challenges accessing voice and data services on the mobile network.

Some of our customers would also have experienced, for a short period of time, difficulty accessing data on their mobile devices. We alleviated this challenge by implementing a temporary APN bypass. Although that was regularized quickly as indicated, some customers would not have had service if they were in proximity to locations where the battery back-up power ran out.

Our team actively monitored the situation and remained in close contact with the utility provider and fuel partners throughout the ordeal.

By 1:00 a.m. on February 17, 90% of our nodes were back in service and by 10:00 a.m. approximately 100% of our cell sites were on-air.

Data Centre and Cloud Services – unimpacted, 100% uptime

In 2010, TSTT invested in a world-class Data Centre which was the first in the region to achieve TIA-942-B (Rated 3), DCOS maturity level 3, and SOC Type 2 international standards certification. TSTT operates the only Data Centre in our region with this level of certification for facilities and operations.

In 2017 we launched bCloud, the region’s first and only VMware Cloud Verified service, making it possible for local enterprises to benefit from an on-island cloud service without compromising the quality and availability that may be derived from an international provider.

On February 16, the redundancy we engineered performed as designed. Despite the loss of commercial power, all Data Centre and Cloud Services were unimpacted. There was 100% uptime and all systems remained fully functional.

All co-located services were available to the clients we support, including one of the region’s largest financial institutions. The customers who utilize our cloud services (IaaS, BaaS, e-Tender, DRaaS, VCaaS, UcaaS, PaaS) * were able to continue functioning seamlessly. The transition to and from our backup power supply was also undetectable to our customers.

*Infrastructure as a Service, Backup as a Service, Disaster Recovery as a Service, Video Communication as a Service, Unified Communication as a Service, Platform as a Service.