THE Island’s largest telecoms company has been fined £90,000 after an Islandwide technical failure in July 2020 left people unable to call 999.
JT customers were unable to access phone and internet services during the outage and, following an investigation, the Jersey Competition Regulatory Authority has issued the fine, which the regulator said could have been far greater.
Tim Ringsdore, chief executive of the authority, said: ‘This has been a long and complex investigation following an outage of the JT network that affected all consumers and businesses, including the failure of the essential 999 emergency call service.
‘Throughout, JT has worked with us to resolve the issues and to put in place a system of checks and balances that will improve its infrastructure, process and procedures and help it to meet best practice going forward.’
The JCRA said that it had taken account of JT’s co-operation with the investigation and the steps already taken to address the problems in determining the level of the fine.
JT interim chief executive John Diamond said: ‘JT accepts the final decision made by the JCRA on this important issue. We take any matters like this exceptionally seriously and have worked closely and productively with the JCRA through the process.
‘I would like to apologise again to our customers for the disruption, and to thank our teams who have carefully and collaboratively worked through the sequence of events which led to the problem in July 2020, to ensure it will not be repeated.’
Last April, JT, along with Sure, were fined a combined £810,000 after service failures left Islanders unable to call 999 on six occasions between January and April 2020. Then, the JCRA issued JT with a £675,000 fine and Sure a penalty of £135,000 for ‘serious breaches’ of their licence obligations. On two occasions there were complete outages during which no one could call 999, and on the other four occasions the States police had to step in and field emergency calls.
