According to a report by Virgin Islands News Online, Digicel BVI has opened up its voice and data networks to customers of its locally-owned rival Caribbean Cellular Telephone (CCT) following the smaller company’s ongoing network outage. CCT’s services went down on 31 December and it is believed that the problems have yet to be fully rectified by engineers. Digicel’s commercial manager Su Thomas commented: ‘Digicel provided this temporary network access following a serious outage on CCT’s network in the BVI which has seriously affected all CCT customers over recent days. Whilst this arrangement will allow CCT subscribers to once again make and receive calls, those subscribers will continue to be billed by CCT as per the ordinary course’.
Established in 1986 as CCT Boatphone, CCT is a BVI-owned telecoms provider, and offers mobile connectivity over a variety of platforms. Pan-Caribbean mobile operator Digicel launched commercial GSM-based services in the British Virgin Islands, its 30th market worldwide, in November 2008. The third company active within the sector is LIME, which is owned by UK-based Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC).