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WRITTEN QUESTION TO THE MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND RESOURCES BY THE CONNÉTABLE OF ST. JOHN
ANSWER TO BE TABLED ON TUESDAY 26th JUNE 2012
Question
Given many millions of pounds of funding has been put into telecommunications from the public purse, would the Minister, as the representative of the shareholder, provide a breakdown of the number of faults identified by Jersey Telecom from December 2011 to date, indicating which parishes have been most affected?
Answer
It should be pointed out that the funding made available for JT is an investment, and will be repaid.
While JT deals with many faults that are not related to its network but instead to matters such as equipment in use by the subscriber or varying levels of technical ability, the vast majority of these are dealt with by the staff at JT's 24/7 call centre.
There are, on average, approximately 800 network faults dealt with by JT's network engineers per month, split as follows since December 2011:
Month | Dec 11 | Jan 12 | Feb 12 | Mar 12 | Apr 12 | May 12 |
Network faults | 856 | 786 | 736 | 783 | 962 | 814 |
This is not considered out of the ordinary for a network that carries an average of 9.2m calls per week, 98.7% of which are successful.
The faults cannot be split by parish as JT runs an Island-wide network where parish boundaries are not relevant to how it manages the network or faults arising thereon.
Another point worth making is that network faults are expected to drop quite significantly as JT replaces its copper network with a fibre network (the Gigabit Jersey programme). Fibre is a vastly superior technology and not prone to the levels of faults suffered by copper laying beneath the ground (for example, water ingress affects copper but not glass fibre). The industry and JT view is that a fibre network will see a reduction in network faults of as a result of the move to fibre.
Finally the Minister would also like to remind Members of an invitation he issued last week to an update from management of JT on 2 July dealing with the annual performance of the company, Gigabit Jersey and any other questions Members may have.