As you have probably realised most of the entries have been backdated and while I would like to claim that I was too busy to log on (which I was) the real reason was a lot crazier than that.
From Friday afternoon we could not make or receive international calls, the internet was down and so were the ATMs because of a ship dropped its anchor right through an underwater cable.
I am not sure of the exact ins and outs but here is a news report on what happened…
35,000 residential phone customers, 60,000 mobile customers, and over 3500 internet customers had no internet and limited international direct dialed services over the weekend.
The problem appeared because the undersea Arcos-1 fiber optic network collapsed when a ship’s anchor ruptured part of the Arcos-1 submarine fiber optic cable route between Venezuela and Colombia. Normally it would not have been a problem, but a week earlier part of the same Arcos-1 route between Cancun and Miami had been similarly ruptured. A Coincidence of unfortunate events that caught BTL without a ‘plan B’ and left its customers electronically stranded