The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

THE Bahamas Telecommunications Company's (BTC) chief executive yesterday pledged that within a year this nation would no longer be last in the Western Hemisphere for mobile broadband Internet penetration, telling Tribune Business it was "critical for the Bahamas to really seize" upcoming opportunities in this area.

Geoff Houston said BTC and its 51 per cent majority owner, Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC), were seeking to increase broadband penetration - both fixed and mobile - up "quite significantly" in the Bahamas, given estimates that studies had shown a 10 per cent increase here grew a country's GDP and productivity, on average, by 3.2 per cent and 2.6 per cent, respectively.

He was speaking after Tribune Business obtained an Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) report that ranked the Bahamas dead last in the Latin American and Caribbean region - below even economic 'basket cases' such as Haiti - for mobile broadband penetration per 100 inhabitants.

Mobile broadband penetration in the Bahamas was pegged by the IDB report, Bridging Gaps Builds Opportunity, at somewhere in the region of three-five per 100 inhabitants. The Bahamas' penetration rate had not changed between 2009 and 2011.

"There are wide differences between Latin American and Caribbean countries, with Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina among the most advanced in the region, while Paraguay, Bolivia and the Bahamas are at the bottom of the scale," the IDB report said.

The Bahamas fared better when it came to fixed broadband Internet lines per 10o persons, ranking in the 'middle of the pack' with about eight-nine connections, just below the likes of Panama and Brazil, and well ahead of the likes of Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.

Mobile data, provided via broadband platforms, is central to CWC/LIME's plans for BTC. Mr Houston yesterday told Tribune Business he was not surprised that this nation ranked 'bottom of the pack' in the Western Hemisphere, and explained that the significant investment being made in installing its 4G network - set to hit $48 million by end-March 2013 - was designed to rectify this.

The BTC chief executive told this newspaper that he expected more than 50 per cent of the carrier's 350,000-400,000 cellular subscribers to be using their cell phones as the primary means of Internet access within the next three-five years, using the platforms the company was now putting in place.

"I look forward to the IDB running the same study, and let's see where we are by May next year. I'd be very surprised if the Bahamas was anywhere near the bottom by May next year," Mr Houston pledged to Tribune Business.

On the current IDB report, which was published on May 30, 2012, the BTC chief executive added: "We do understand that the Bahamas has got a significant lag in terms of broadband penetration, both in mobile and fixed.

"In an economy with the GDP per capita the Bahamas has, we'd like to think we'd get broadband penetration up quite significantly. But we're not surprised, given the timing of the report, that the Bahamas was ranked so low. I believe that it's critical for the Bahamas to really seize the opportunity on broadband."

Mr Houston attributed this to the fact "the country never had a mobile network that can offer bearable broadband service. The mobile network that we're now painstakingly changing out is obsolete and, we would probably contend, was never much of a fit for voice traffic, let alone broadband".

The 4g network that BTC is now installing is designed to provide the "high speed connectivity" and platform for mobile broadband, Mr Houston explained, giving the carrier - which has a monopoly in this sector until 2014 - the foundation "to drive up the whole usage and penetration of mobile broadband across the Bahamas".

The BTC chief said "huge upgrades" to the cellular network took place over the past weekend, with the newly-privatised carrier "changing out" the text and voice platforms, along with the pre-paid billing systems. This, he added, was "impacting every single subscriber".

BTC, Mr Houston said, was already seeing strong mobile demand in islands where the 4G network was already installed - Grand Bahama, Abaco, the Berry Islands and Bimini. It had now been "rolled out" across 50 per cent of the Bahamas, with the remaining islands to be completed over the next 12 weeks before summer's end.

Alongside this, Mr Houston said BTC was also constructing a new 2G cellular network, the idea being that this would handle cellular voice traffic, thus freeing up its 4G counterpart for data traffic via mobile broadband.

And he disclosed that BTC had also applied to the Utilities Regulation & Competition Authority (URCA) for an allocation of spectrum in the 700 MhZ spectrum band. If successful, Mr Houston said this would allow BTC to "build an even faster mobile broadband experience, developing it further over the next three-five years".

The BTC chief executive estimated that in CWC's first two years of majority ownership, the carrier would have spent $48 million by end-March 2013 on "changing out" the cellular network, installing the new 2G and 4G platforms, and all the billing and management systems.

"Our ambition is really to see the Bahamas on the cutting edge," he told Tribune Business, suggesting that the Bahamas would likely "be there sooner" than industry forecasts that 80 per cent of Internet users would use their cell phones as the primary means of Internet access by 2020.

"Roughly speaking we have about 350,000-400,000 mobile subscribers in the Bahamas," Mr Houston said. "We would expect in the future that well over half those users will be using their mobile or handheld devices on a regular basis to access the Internet. My expectation is that we could exceed that threshold in the next three-four years."

The BTC chief executive also told Tribune Business that he expected Family Island consumers in areas currently "underserved" by fixed and mobile communications would likely "leapfrog" the former, eschewing fixed DSL and cable broadband and going "straight to mobile".