TWO POWER failures at Kensington Oval last night interrupted the Nation newspaper’s first attempt at a major commercial Internet streaming of the 2014 MQI/LIME/Banks Pic-O-De-Crop calypso finals.
Editor-in-Chief Roy Morris, who was at the Oval for the entire operation, explained that soon after the show started, power to the four- storey building housing the Media Centre at the historic cricket ground was lost.
This, officials said, coincided with the energising of equipment related to the show and as a result, all Internet network switches went offline.
“This was beyond our control,” Morris said, “and we had to wait until personnel from Kensington Oval were able to restore power and reset the switches. We sincerely apologise for this failure to keep all who subscribed connected to the show the entire night.
“Just when we thought the problem was solved, there was a second interruption at the start of the second half of the show, which lasted for about 15 minutes. It was a problem we did not anticipate and officials of Kensington Oval Management Inc. (KOMI) stressed they had never experienced such an interruption before,” Morris added.
Also in response to criticism from some subscribers who said they were not satisfied with the quality of the Internet connection during the course of the night, the Nation’s head of technology Terry Jones, who supervised the electronic side of operations, explained that his team monitored the line throughout the night and found it delivered “a consistent four megabits upstream” from the dedicated circuit provided by Digicel through KOMI.
“That was more than adequate for what we were doing,” Jones said, explaining that the slow connection experienced by some subscribers outside of Barbados would have originated with their own service providers.”
Morris added: “In any event, we wholeheartedly take ownership of anything we undertake and assure those who supported us that this was the start of something big. In the future, wherever it is possible we will seek to provide redundancy in our system, although that would have made little difference this time around since the service to both providers at the Oval was knocked out.” (PR)
