By Bianca Symonette,Guardian Staff Reporter,bianca@nasguard.com

Thousands of GSM customers were without service yesterday as power glitches at the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) disabled its network for a few hours.

According to Marlon Johnson, Vice-president of Marketing Sales and Business Development at BTC, GSM service for prepaid customers went down around 6:57 a.m. on Tuesday. He added that the company's technical team had been busy for most of the morning and early afternoon isolating the power failure and rerouting power to bring the system back on stream.

"The technical team has to make sure that the power failure is isolated and that power is restored quickly so that persons won't be inconvenienced," Johnson said. "About 90 percent of our customers are on GSM prepaid and we are cognizant that persons depend on the cell service for essential needs. So our first objective is to get back on stream and then look into the cause, to ensure that it does not happen again in the future."

He explained that BTC deals with a lot of heavy equipment on a daily basis, which creates a power sharing challenge. He said the company experienced a power surge on Tuesday, which subsequently lead to a system crash.

"One of the things that we do is monitoring and maintenance, and a post evaluation is completed. If it is determined that we have to add more capacity on the power supply then we will do that," Johnson said.

BTC has some 250,000 GSM customers in The Bahamas, 90 percent of which are prepaid.

BTC's postpaid customers were not affected and their service was said to be up and running during the power failure.

Johnson apologized for any inconvenience and said compensation to the customers was under consideration. Usually when the company experiences problems and its system goes down, customers' phones are credited calling time for the inconvenience.

The system was expected to return to normal by 2 p.m. however, services were not restored until 2:40 p.m. BTC reported that services were disrupted for about eight hours.

In a statement earlier yesterday, BTC said, "The Bahamas Telecommunications Company Limited wishes to advise the public that due to technical difficulties on our prepaid cellular platform, our prepaid customers may be experiencing difficulties making and receiving calls, as well as sending and receiving text messages. Our technical teams are working to ensure that this is rectified as soon as possible."