In April, BTL finally found its new leader in European Rochus Schreiber, a 20 year veteran in the telecommunications industry. BTL held a press conference today to formally introduce Schreiber as CEO. Schreiber touched on BTL's switch to fiber optic to deliver internet to homes, as well as improving the reliability of their internet service in general including the outdated copper network…

Rochus Schreiber - CEO, BTL
"They are two fronts in which we will be operating, one is a continuation of what we already started which is the mobile network evolution. As you know we already launched 11 new sites in the first quarter of this year which brings our total mobile coverage to 111 sites across Belize which is the most of any of the two networks which operate here and this will continue. This year we are planning to add more sites, we currently have a plan for 17 more and we are budgeting to add another in total 50 sites to bring our coverage to every area where there are customers in Belize. In parallel to that we are working on our fixed infrastructure, so that is the infrastructure where we have cables. We already started with laying submarine cables to San Pedro and we will now continue from that to roll out fiber optic network all the way to the homes, to the customer homes in San Pedro which I already mentioned and then very shortly also in Belize City. This will be followed up with a rollout of fiber optic network and fiber to the home to the rest of the country. Overall our plan is to provide high speed internet to every customer in Belize."

"What I have seen here is that we do have issues with an aging network that we are operating so BTL is operating a copper fixed network which is quite old, it has been in place for many years and it's coming to the end of its life. So that's why we made a conscious decision to replace this network, continuing to invest into the aging infrastructure as it is right now would not actually allow us to deliver what I mentioned before which is world class speeds at lower cost."

Schreiber also mentioned that once the company has fully transitioned to using fiber they will look into bundling internet and telephone services.

Channel 7