Oranjestad- Telecom Company EUTEL will soon be offering (much) faster internet to their customers, thanks to a network upgrade. The upgrade was made possible, in part thanks to a small subsidy received from Bureau Telecom. The rest of the investment will come out of the government-owned company’s own pockets.

The speed will increase thanks to bringing EUTEL’s copper network closer to the customers on St. Eustatius, which will improve throughput and thus enable faster data traffic. To achieve this, the company has constructed a number of cabinets and by changing over to a so-called VDSL network instead of an ADSL network.

The best part of the news is that the improvement in internet speed will come at no additional costs for customers. The BES-Reporter understand that the actual speed improvement does depend on the location of the customer’s connection, relative to the new cabinets constructed. Some customer could therefor see a bigger improvement to other customers.

The current copper network used by EUTEL was no longer future-proof and therefor needs to be replaced.

Slow internet speeds (at a relatively high price) has long been a complaint from internet users both on St. Eustatius and Saba, in spite of considerable investments made by Holland in the past in the sea cable bringing internet to the islands.