Statement from Lime received Monday July 19^th at 4:15pm

In the early morning of Sunday 28th July at approximately 6AM, a failure occurred on the MAYA-1 Cable System.  The MAYA-1 Cable System is a submarine cable system that runs north and south out of the Cayman Islands, it is this system that provides internet and international capacity for LIME Cayman Islands, LIME Jamaica and LIME Turks and Caicos.

LIME’s initial findings are that the Maya-1 Cable System has suffered a shunt fault at on Segment 6, which is located between Half Moon Bay (Cable station) and Repeater 1 (Line Amplifier) in Cayman.  The failure is preventing the local power feeding units from reaching their operating output levels and forcing them into shutdown mode despite numerous attempts to restore them.   This first repeater is some 47km out to sea, and at this stage there is no definitive information on the exact location of the impairment that is causing the shunt fault so LIME’s team is continuing to work with local resources, suppliers and the other MAYA landing stations on this matter.

As no damage on the “Land Segment” of the system has been found, the team has now turned their efforts to more closely examining the shore-end of the cable system. These activities are now underway with divers familiar with the cable-landing, making the necessary preparations to conduct this detailed survey. The divers are expected to specifically identify any possible impairments that may be of concerns and potentially leading to this outage.

Restoration

LIME took steps yesterday to restore as much traffic as possible to go via the Cayman Jamaica Fibre system.  At the moment all restorable traffic has been activated.  i.e. where capacity is available and operators have prior agreements.

Current Customer Impact

Internet customers (ADSL and Mobile data) may experience degradation of internet service.

Customers may also experience intermittent failures with international dialing

Customers of Logic and West Star will experience issues with the international capacity

Roaming customers may encounter call issues.

34% of the Cayman international circuits are still down. Customers will likely experience difficulties throughout the day when calling internationally.  Inbound calls will also be impacted.

Cable Repair Ship on Standby

In addition to the ongoing inspections, LIME has also taken the preliminary step of advising a cable repair ship as a member of the Atlantic Cable Maintenance Agreement body (ACMA), effectively placing them on standby in the event the fault is proven to be at sea.

Further Restoration Attempt

Lastly, LIME is also working with the MAYA Consortium to reconfigure the system in an attempt to power-feed the cable from Miami.  This is a complex process that will require a complete system outage and will be attempted starting at mid-night, Tuesday 0000.  At this stage the Cayman traffic is down, but please note that MAYA traffic between the Americas (not destined for Cayman) is still working, however this reconfiguration will force a full system outage.

LIME GM Tony Ritch stated, “This is obviously a major outage for the Country, and we apoligize for this protracted downtime and impact to consumers and businesses.  Regrettably given the complexity of this system, it is taking quite some time to identify the fault.  At this stage we are expecting the system configuration changes that will commence in a few hours to yield positive results and restore the traffic.  Our local team is also working diligently to re-route traffic where possible to minimize the impact.  As more information becomes available, LIME will provide updates to the media and via various channels including text alerts to the wider base.”

He concluded, “Until we are able to conduct some additional tests (in the early hours of Tuesday morning) once the entire system is off-line, we may not be able to definitively identify the likely location of a possible cable fault.  Unfortunately, LIME will not be able to offer any additional details on the likely restoration time-frame until more information becomes available.”