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BTL Working Through Its Difficulties
Thu, February 4, 2016
Just a couple weeks after BTL slashed its calling rates, hitting an all-time low of 47 cents…bam! There entire short code system went down. That meant thousands of customers were unable access simple services like checking their credit balance, buying bundles, and other essential services that sustain the mobile experience. Today there system is back online, or at least partially.

Today we spoke with Gale Malic, the Senior Public Relations Representative at BTL, who gave us an update on the status of their short code system.

Gale Malic-Ozeata, Senior Public Relations Representative - BTL
"Our shorts codes are back up as of Monday afternoon. We notified our customers via social media pages, we sent them a text blast. We also did call in to the radio shows to let them know that most of short codes are working. The ones that they use the most, which are the 135, the *22 and *20 to check your credit and add credit. Our *100 for the 100 ways promotion; the *767 to buy and check text bundles and also the *932 to but the 2G plan. The *638 to buy the night shift plan too. So all those are working. So what were able to do in a span of one week, we were able to restore on the servers that went down that supports these short codes. We have a second server currently down which we are working on to restore and we hope to have that restored by the end of next week."

Reporter
"What will the company do to prevent this from happening again?"

Gale Malic-Ozeata, Senior Public Relations Representative - BTL
"What we are doing right now is that we are looking to putting redundancy plan - a backup plan using probably our same USSB codes, like for example when the system went down, we had a 72# which could be used to check account balance instead of the 135 which was down at the time. We are looking at putting in USSB codes for the other short codes. The double up that we are having today is to say sorry for the inconvenience. We've also extended our 100 ways promotion for the entire month of February. This is to say thank you to our customers for their patients and understanding."

But while BTL is strapping down on the short code system failure, there is another issue that costumers have been railing about. That is the often congested 4g services. Here is what Malic told us about that.

Gale Malic-Ozeata, Senior Public Relations Representative - BTL "On that we will have a formal statement at the end of the month. But we are currently doing improvements to our network and we are doing testing at this time to see how those improvements are going and we continue to do the upgrades to some of the other systems as well. But a more formal statement will be shared with the media at the end of the month on that."

BTL says that there has not been any significant drop in revenues from their services, which the company takes to mean that their customers are maintaining their loyalty as the company works through its difficulties.

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