The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

The Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority (URCA) aims to “take the Bahamas to the world” as a leader in information and communications technology (ICT), its top executive saying: “We have a very good foundation for ICT in the country”.

Stephen Bereaux, its acting chief executive, said: “It is our hope that both domestically and internationally, the country will begin to leverage what we have. We have a very good foundation for ICT in the country.

“We have great off-island connections, a very good domestic network if you compare us with countries of similar size, particularly considering the number of islands that we have, but we are a very interconnected archipelago. The Government sees, and we share the view, that ICT is a way you can improve your economy.”

Mr Bereaux continued: “The Government policy is that the country will be a leader. URCA, as regulator and advisor to the Government, is also responsible for promoting that policy and implementing it.

“One of the things we are doing is taking the Bahamas to the world as a leader in the ICT space. We do that through our work with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).”

Mr Bereaux said that this year, URCA, on behalf of the Government, will host for the first time a major ITU conference - a symposium expected to attract between 600-700 government regulators, in addition to the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU) conference.

Mr Bereaux said the regulator was currently finalising its annual plan for 2017, and added: “The key matter this year, obviously, is on the electricity side. We hope to complete our work on small-scale renewables within the next month or so. That would finally enable people to install solar installations on their houses and sell back to BPL. That will be critical. We’re happy about that.

“The electricity sector should see a lot of work in terms of getting the framework up and running, getting BPL’s consumer protection plan rolled out properly to the public. Hopefully, we will be finishing that.

“During the course of this year we also plan to begin an efficiency study of BPL. We will try to investigate to figure out whether there are changes and adjustments that can be made to assist in meeting the challenges with the electricity supply, both the supply and the cost of it,” the URCA chief executive added.

“On the electronic communications side the focus is pretty much the same thing. We’re in the process of liberalisation, getting Aliv’s services rolled out to all of the islands that they are responsible for, which will continue through this year into the next.”

Mr Bereaux added that URCA is also focusing on its own performance. “There is a lot of work we are doing. We just revised our strategic plan,” he said.

“We want to find ways to create subjective measures of the impact of our regulation on the public and, internally, our own performance, whether or not we are doing what we should be doing and whether it is having the impact it should be having.”