The business pace is picking up in St. David's with the introduction of fibre optic cable by the Bermuda Land Development Company (BLDC) at Southside.

Promoting themselves as the centre for e-commerce development and working hard to attract new companies to the East End development, the BLDC have contacted the Bermuda Telephone Company (BTC) to provide new fibre optic cable service.

The move greatly increases the speed at which electronic transactions are now able to take place with hooked up companies at Southside.

Fort Knox CEO Troy Symonds yesterday expressed delight with the development. A tenant of the BLDC, Mr. Symonds said that his e-commerce company had expected the cable to be installed much sooner.

"We expected to have it last November,'' he said, "We started organising our company in September and thought we would have the service shortly after.'' But by the end of March when Fort Knox had their official opening, the fibre optic cable was still unavailable and Fort Knox were forced to use existing copper cable. Averylon Simons, vice president of government and carrier relations for BTC, explained that the sudden resignation of then BLDC chief executive officer, Carl Musson, caused a delay in negotiations.

"We rushed that project last year,'' he said, "but we had finished laying the cable by February. That was right on target for us,'' he added.

"We were held up because of the change in administration at BLDC. There was quite a while when they had no CEO,'' he said. Agreements were finally signed between the BLDC and BTC "just after the May 24th holiday'', Mr. Simons said.

Breathing a huge sigh of relief that it now has fibre optic capability, Mr.

Symonds said he could now look to attract new business. "We now have all our customers on the fibre,'' he said, "and we really need those facilities to be able to handle the volume of business we will be doing.'' Fort Knox provides electronic back-up and mirrors the transactions of its client companies.

"The fibre optic capacity means that companies in Hamilton can connect with us and download and mirror their information much faster, and in a much more secure environment,'' Mr. Symonds said.

"Our clients need to be able to work directly with their computers here, so speed is critical.'' He pointed out that the security associated with the fibre optic system was also very important because it prevented people from "tapping into'' information. A feat achievable with a copper wire connection.

Michael Swan the BTC's network planner for the Southside project said that the new technology has a capacity of 622 million bits per second. Two cables were laid to provide a back-up should one experience a fault.

It will still be a few more weeks before all companies at Southside are connected to the fibre optic network. The latest glitch was caused as BTC ran out of a special card needed for each hook-up.

"We have ordered those cards and they should be here now,'' said BTC's Mr.

Simons, "originally we were given a limited number but have received more and everyone will be able to be connected.'' Troy Symonds