Frustrated with Flow service
Published:Thursday | May 9, 2024 | 12:05 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
I am the director of a multidisciplinary medical centre in the Boulevard Supercentre. Our operations have been digitised since 2016. We are more than 80 per cent paperless. The critical infrastructure required to maintain this is electricity and a constant Internet supply. Internet supply is required, among other things, for receipt of results, as well as authorisation for credit and health cards. We have maintained two Internet supplies to ensure our service standard.
Most recently, those two supplies have been Flow Fibre and the Cable and Wireless copper system, the so-called legacy network. We have maintained these two after several trial-and-error scenarios. We have been advised by Flow that the legacy network is being discontinued, and we are obliged to convert our telephone lines and secondary Internet source to a new fibre system.
The current fibre service fails with some degree of regularity.
The legacy network is slow but reliable, and unaffected by power outages. Those of us old enough to remember Hurricane Gilbert will recall that the legacy network prevailed throughout that period. A secondary Internet source from the other land line-based provider is of no value as our experience, is they also fail when Flow Fibre fails. We have been told they are on the same backbone in our area.
Power outages at the source of the fibre supply results in a loss of Internet service, despite the fibre system being more expensive. Adding telephone lines to this system now places that communication link in jeopardy as well. This cannot be an acceptable situation in 2024 for business or for a national telecoms provider in a country prone to natural disasters such as weather systems and earthquakes.
Our office Internet service has been intermittent for the last three weeks, and we lost service for an entire day because there was no electricity at the source of our fibre-based signal. On a related note, my Flow fibre-based home phone has also been out of service for the last two weeks, with no indication of resolution. A satellite-based alternative is imminent.
ORVILLE NEMBHARD