7 News Belize

When The Western Fiber Went Dark
posted (March 3, 2015)
Last night tens of thousands of Belizeans across some areas of the south and all of the west couldn't see 7News - or any news for that matter. That's because Central Cable Vision which carries signals to Belmopan, Santa Elena/San Ignacio, Benque Viejo, Dangriga, Placencia and Independence had a break it the fiber optic cable it leases from BTL. IT was BTL's problem to fix, but it hit home for the thousands who kept waiting for their local news and waited in vain. Some of you all thought we had gone off the air or something: we assure you we did not - we had a two hour newscast. Sad that you missed it - but glad that the problem has been resolved. Today we went to BTL Headquarters to find out what went wrong:..

Marsha Haylock, Acting Chief Customer Service Officer
"We had customers that couldn't view local channels. We had one cable company that was affected, that feeds the south and the west of the country and so as you mentioned, they couldn't view local channels. We had our technicians dispatched to the area as soon as we got the news and they began working to rectify and to bring the service back up. We had service up back for the 2G service by 1:34pm yesterday afternoon and the cable company had service by midday this afternoon. So all our services are up back. We are functioning and we have resolved the issue for right now."

Kevin Hope, Chief Technology Officer
"What we did, we rerouted a number of the circuits, the traffic that we had on those cables onto other cables and as a result we were able to restore those services. We continue to work on the cable that was damaged and so the work on that is ongoing. At some point within the next week or two, once we restore or repair that cable, we will then revert those services back."

BTL assures the public that they are repairing the faulty fiber cable but have a backup service that has restored the cable feed. So those you worrying about not seeing our LIVE election coverage tomorrow, can be assured that you will.

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