Cable and Wireless Communications (CWC), part of Liberty Latin America (LLA), has assured customers that it is preparing for this year’s hurricane season, following the devastating impact of hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. The operator says it has invested in new mobile towers ‘built specifically to withstand category five wind conditions’ as part of its reconstruction and restoration programme in Dominica, British Virgin Islands (BVI) and Anguilla. In addition, the company has reinforced its submarine cable systems with increased transmission capacity across fibre links in some markets and more redundancy options.
CWC Caribbean President Gary Sinclair explained the company’s preparations: ‘While we are enormously proud of our network performance in the hurricane-impacted islands last year, we know we have to continue to prepare for the current season. We are hard at work shoring up our defences to make our networks even more resilient and robust for the 2018 season. For example, in Dominica, one of the hardest hit markets, we’ve relocated our main exchange to higher ground – a reinforced second floor location. In the BVI, another hard hit market, we reinforced the network towers and expanded the underground network to bolster redundancies should telephone poles become compromised during a hurricane.’