The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

THE Bahamas Telecommunications Company’s (BTC) chief executive yesterday said the company expects to complete its 4G roll-out across the country by end-September 2012, and introduce Long Term Evolution (LTE) service within the next 18 months.

Geoff Houston said: “We expect to complete the whole of the Bahamas probably by the end of September. We are actually putting in a brand new 2G network in the Bahamas, so in the future when you connect into the network if you make a voice call you will connect to the 4G and be dropped to the 2G network, where all your voice traffic will be carried, enabling the 4G network of the future to be the one that carries data.

“When we started out, before we launched the 4G network in  New Providence and Grand Bahama, about 3 per cent of our sales were on smart phone. Today, probably 30-35 per cent of our customers are buying smartphones.”

Speaking at a meeting of Rotary Club of Nassau Sunrise, Mr Houston said: “What has overwhelmed us is the demand for data in the Bahamas. Since we have fixed up all this, we have found that data usage in the Bahamas increased by about 400 per cent.

“We have seen a 30 per cent increase in voice traffic over the last 12 months, which tells me that the market in the Bahamas has been held back primarily through a lack of functionality and capability in the basic network infrastructure.”

Mr Houston said two-thirds of BTC’s business is generated from its mobile/cellular monopoly.

“We put a new platform in place which will allow us to reconfigure people’s handsets, so that when they are accessing data on the network it’s all properly configured,” Mr Houston added.

“That platform also enables us to know what is in the market in terms of handsets and, today, we can tell that there are 2,300 different handsets in the market. A large number of those handsets are unable to properly connect to our network, so what we are saying now is we have probably got 250,000 phones in the market that we’re going to have to change-up over the next 12-24 months to enable those customers to get the type of experience they really want from the network we’re building.”

Mr Houston said that overthe next 18 months the company plans put in LTE technology.

“LTE is the next generation of 4G. It’s about 10 times faster,” said Mr Houston.

“We are also rolling out a whole network of new stores. I think we have done eight flagship stores already. We hope to get 14-15 flagship stores done by the end of this year, and then we expect to roll-out at leastanother 30-35 with our business partners.”

He added of BTC’s condition immediately post-privatisation: “When we got into the business, what we found was a business that was not only full of opportunities but as full of challenges.

“We had a mobile network that was virtually obsolete and was suffering from a lot of different problems across all the islands. It was an old 2G network supplied by Nortel, which no longer exists. We had a fixed-line business which was going through a transformation, but was having significant problems in making the next leap in moving to the next generation technology.

“We had a business which had lost 75 per cent of the broadband market and a business which had lost probably over half of the corporate enterprise market.”

Mr Houston said the company has a lot of work to do on its next generation (NGN) platform for fixed-line broadband. “When we do that, that will enable us to compete on a more equitable basis right across the Bahamas. At the moment we can only compete in very select areas where we have actually managed to migrate some customers across. Where we have done it we are actually winning back customers,” he said.