Liberty Puerto Rico overcoming hurdles of integrating wireless service

For more than a year, Liberty Puerto Rico has been laying the groundwork to migrate about a million new customers it acquired from AT&T locally and the U.S. Virgin Islands to its systems.

As it transitioned from being a purely fixed telecommunications services provider to include a new wireless division, Liberty has faced challenges related to developing – from the ground up – a set of new technologies to manage the significantly larger customer base.

Aamir Hussain, Liberty’s chief technology and product officer, spoke candidly to News is my Business about the process, which late last month resulted temporary service affecting certain customers.

“Let me take some time to talk about this. So, there are three types of experiences that customers get. For a big chunk of customers, they don’t have to do anything – we migrate them overnight. The next morning, they wake up, they show up on the Liberty network,” said Hussain, estimating this group at about 50% to 60% of the new customer base. “They don’t even see a difference.”

“Then there’s a percentage of the customers who must upgrade either their software or reconfigure the phone. And then there’s another small percentage of customers who will also have to do some software upgrades to the phone – because, you know, we found out that AT&T had been pushing software, but a lot of our customers, they didn’t upgrade their devices.”

Customers who were identified as having older devices or operating systems, were sent multiple notifications before the migration but as is “human nature, you get a text from a service provider, and don’t even look at it,” Hussain said. “So, when their phone isn’t working, they call us and, in most cases, we can guide them to upgrade the software.”

Hussain, who joined Liberty Latin America in April 2022 and is also its senior vice president, is responsible for the telecom’s Technology & Innovation team. He has served in senior roles at Verizon Communications, CenturyLink and Liberty Global.

Although this migration is not his first – he has more than 28 years of experience in the implementation of global technology operations, innovation, complex infrastructures and consumer and business solutions – Hussain admitted this one is unique because it “goes beyond a simple customer transfer from one system to another.”

“From a systems perspective, we are ready. And it’s important to note that this migration has been very different from others because usually the buy and sell works between service providers who are in the business already,” Hussain said. “In our case, we had to build a brand-new core and we had to build the IT. We were a fixed service provider in this market, and we were renting AT&T’s system. All that got built over the last 18 months and is now starting to get in use.”