Good business continuity planning and making timely decisions were significant factors in ensuring the nation’s telecommunications network has continued to perform well in a crisis situation, according to Manx Telecom chief executive Gary Lamb.

Speaking to Business News from his home last week, Mr Lamb said although there was an increase in demand on the network, particularly in the early evenings, MT’s operations continue to run smoothly despite the current disruption caused by Covid-19 precautions.

He said: ’Clearly a robust and stable telecoms network is a key part of the island’s infrastructure - government, businesses and the general public rely on it 24 hours a day - so business continuity planning is a crucial tool for us.

’Early on when the current crisis just started to break, we took the opportunity to review and refresh our plans in the light of what was likely to happen. We then took an early decision to start getting our people to work from home.

’This gave us a period of time to really test the plans and test the technology behind them which proved to work really well.

’From thereon, it has just been a matter of making some adjustments.

’We’re obviously keeping a very close watch on usage patterns and how the network performs but it has been a pretty straightforward operation.’ Under initial lockdown guidance, Manx Telecom engineers were limited to critical infrastructure repairs or dealing with faults for people classified as vulnerable.

However, recent updates now allow for construction-related external engineering works to take place as well.

This has included resuming the roll out of fibre, said Mr Lamb, although Manx Telecom still cannot undertake work inside homes at the moment.

He added: ’The roll out of fibre is a very important project for the Isle of Man and we’d like to accelerate that as quickly as we can.

’Once the island is fully wired for fibre, if we ever find ourselves in a similar situation again we’ll be even better prepared.

’We’ll have fantastic broadband connectivity that will make running a business remotely and keeping in touch with each other even easier.’

Gary Lamb