Sean Nero

Man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Flow Trinidad Bri­an Collins wants the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (TATT) to name the coun­try's newest mo­bile li­censee.

In a T&T Guardian in­ter­view, Collins said Flow ap­plied to TATT for a mo­bile li­cense in 2014 has not re­ceived a re­sponse from the agency on the sta­tus of their ap­pli­ca­tion. He said the on­ly word about Flow's ap­pli­ca­tion came from Emile Elias, chair­man of ma­jor­i­ty state-owned TSTT, who claimed pub­licly that Flow had re­ceived the nod from TATT. Nat­u­ral­ly, said Collins, in­for­ma­tion as cru­cial as that had to come from a source to be tak­en se­ri­ous­ly.

But Flow, which has es­tab­lished a three-tier busi­ness lo­cal­ly of­fer­ing ca­ble, broad­band and home land­line ser­vices, is ea­ger to en­ter the lo­cal mo­bile mar­ket with the aim of in­tro­duc­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary long term evo­lu­tion (LTE) tech­nol­o­gy, which was be­lieved to ri­val the fourth gen­er­a­tion sys­tem cur­rent­ly used by bmo­bile and Dig­i­cel.

While the lat­ter op­er­at­ing sys­tem re­ferred to mo­bile da­ta tech­nol­o­gy as de­fined by the ra­dio sec­tor of the In­ter­na­tion­al Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion Union, LTE ap­plies gen­er­al­ly to the idea of im­prov­ing wire­less broad­band speeds based on de­mand. Collins said he be­lieves the mar­ket is pen­e­tra­ble and the busi­ness lu­cra­tive.

"We have 25 years of mo­bile ex­pe­ri­ence and back­ground, pro­vid­ing ser­vices in many is­lands around the re­gion. Ca­ble and Wire­less has a mi­nor­i­ty share­hold­ing in TSTT. They don't of­fer ser­vices di­rect­ly to peo­ple in T&T.

"We will jump at the op­por­tu­ni­ty giv­en how we have built one of the largest fi­bre rich net­works in T&T. It is 4,000-kilo­me­tre deep, pass­ing over 300,000 homes in T&T. We will be rolling out the last LTE net­work. We would build the best net­work in T&T and I think peo­ple are de­mand­ing a high­er qual­i­ty mo­bile da­ta prod­uct and ser­vice. The onus is on the reg­u­la­tor and the min­is­ter to step and is­sue the li­cense quick­ly."

Collins added: "T&T is falling be­hind. Ja­maica has start­ed LTE. Bar­ba­dos is go­ing to be rolling it out. Cay­mans launched it. The tele­coms world moves very quick­ly. You could be ahead three years ago, and sud­den­ly you find your­self be­hind, so it's that con­stant con­tin­u­al move­ment that's re­quired. We are ready will­ing and able to in­vest sig­nif­i­cant mon­ey, em­ploy a lot of peo­ple in the con­struc­tion and the launch of it."