More than a decade after completing the acquisition of the Bermuda Telephone Company in 2015, Digicel could this year complete replacement of the old copper wire network with fibre optic cabling.

New Digicel Bermuda chief executive Mark Corrigan told The Royal Gazette that although hundreds of customers have remaining copper connections, the company aims to have the entire issue resolved by the end of December.

In a video interview, Mr Corrigan also addressed a recent spate of complaints about Digicel’s AI customer care bot, Ruby, arguing that the technology is helping many customers to obtain the services they require.

Callers who want to be put through to a human are accommodated, he added, but the bot also resolves the issues of many other customers.

The long-running copper wire replacement project has been a recent source of complaints with residents who still desire landlines.

Copper networks have become obsolete, with fibre optic cables offering much greater bandwidth capacity to meet today’s broadband needs.

According to Hey! Broadband, the British network, copper connections are affected by weather conditions, electrical interference, and signal degradation over distance, while fibre connections remain stable regardless of weather and maintain consistent performance over time.

Mr Corrigan, who is also head of Digicel Business for the Atlantic Region (Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Turks & Caicos Islands and British Virgin Islands), said: “The copper network has served Bermuda very well but if you look globally copper networks are at the end-of-life stage. So most of our customers have already migrated to our true fibre network and when I say true fibre I mean it is fibre from end to end.

“It does not touch copper at all, so we have a best-in-class fibre network here. A fibre infrastructure is as important to any country as an airport, a water system, a highway system, so we are really doubling down our investments on our fibre network here in Bermuda.

“With the copper network, the reason it's at end of life is it is hard to maintain, it is challenging to manage when there are issues. A lot of the vendor support that would have existed ten years ago is not there any more.

“What’s also particularly interesting in Bermuda is the environment, as well. Salty air, moisture, severe weather events can damage copper lines and when they do it can be significant, opposed to a more reliable, faster, higher capacity fibre network for example.

“So where we are with this, the majority of our customers have already migrated to fibre and we have a few hundred residential and corporate customers left. We’re actively engaging with them but that is very much a priority for us to try and move people over to fibre and it is all free of charge.”