Digicel Bermuda is offering free fibre upgrades to customers still using its copper-based voice services after a four-day disruption shut down businesses and emergency telephone lines across the island.

The company said residential and business customers could move to its fibre network at no cost as part of its programme to modernise the network.

The offer follows an outage this month affecting parts of Digicel’s fixed-line voice network. Police and hospital telephone services were disrupted, including the 911 emergency number, although the fire service was not affected.

Emergency calls to police and the hospital were being received again by the evening of July 13. However, some business telephone lines stayed unavailable over the next few days, including direct-dial numbers at Butterfield Bank.

Digicel confirmed on July 16 that service had been fully restored.

At the time, the company said the outage was unrelated to its network modernisation programme. It also said it would conduct a full review of the incident.

However, the company has not publicly disclosed what caused the disruption or released the findings of that review. The Royal Gazette has contacted the telecom for comment.

Digicel said the recent disruption demonstrated the importance of moving customers away from older copper services.

Mark Corrigan, chief executive of Digicel Bermuda, said: “Our focus is on providing customers with the most reliable communications experience possible.

“Fibre is the future of communications, delivering greater resilience, improved performance and the capacity to support the growing connectivity needs of our customers.”

The company said customers moving to fibre would receive clearer voice quality, improved reliability and a communications platform capable of supporting changing needs.

It has dedicated teams available to help customers complete the transition with “minimal disruption”.

Business customers have been asked to contact their account managers, while residential customers can arrange an upgrade through Digicel’s customer care service.

Digicel has described its copper infrastructure as an “end-of-life network” facing increasing pressures to stay operational.

In March 2023, an island-wide outage affected Digicel customers using copper landlines, including the 911 and 211 services and the Government switchboard. Fibre and mobile customers were not affected. The RA subsequently said it would review Digicel’s incident report.

The latest fixed-line disruption followed two island-wide mobile outages within the previous eight months. A fibre cable break in Devonshire caused a three-hour outage in February, while a network problem disrupted calls and mobile data for about 2½ hours in December.