Transcript
Guam-based Pacific Telecom Inc has apologised for an undersea cable breakage that has cut the Northern Marianas off from the outside world.
The outage on the CNMI sole international communications link cut all communications including those for the phone, internet, and banking overnight.
But the company's chief executive James Oehlerking told Moera Tuilaepa-Taylor only emergency services are back in action.
JAMES OEHLERKING: Since the original cut we have been able to restore some basic limited communications that we've provided primarily to government agencies, first responders, there's also a typhoon in progress north of Saipan and so we want to make sure we got some basic level of communications available for dealing with the storm situation. That was completed last night.
MOERA TUILAEPA-TAYLOR: How soon do you hope to have all services fully restored back to the CNMI?
JO: We are tackling this with a three step approach. The first step was to get a basic level of communication back up, which we accomplished last night, today we are working on a larger back-up microwave solution which will give us about 1 gig of capacity for data and voice transmissions in Saipan and Guam which will allow us to again, it's vastly under what normal requirements but significant amount that will allow us some level of restoration of financial services on the island as well as some basic level of communication for businesses and individuals. So we are hoping to try and finish that and get it operational today, again we are working on the islands of Rota and Tinian which are between Guam and Saipan, part of this route, and those are also being affected by the typhoon, so it's a bit of a additional delaying factor that's hard to pinpoint right now as to when we will have that up and I'm hoping by the end of today. After that, step two, we are also contracting for the longer term permanent solution repaired by a cable repair ship where we are in negotiations with right now and trying to get one out of Taiwan which we feel is probably the closet ship available, again there's some weather dependent issues with the typhoons coming into the area, and scheduled to get the boat from Taiwan up to Saipan.
