Mark Lyn­der­say

Last Wednes­day, TSTT launched its Gi­ga­bit Com­mu­ni­ty Project, which com­bines a pi­lot pro­gramme and re­search ini­tia­tive that puts a ful­ly sym­met­ri­cal gi­ga­bit con­nec­tion in­to up­scale res­i­den­tial house­holds at Lega­cy Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment in Ch­agua­nas.

It's a bold move, but one that the com­pa­ny is han­dling with mea­sured lan­guage. De­spite the bold de­c­la­ra­tion by TSTT's chair­man Ever­ald Snag­gs that "gi­ga­bit ca­pac­i­ty de­vel­op­ment through­out com­mu­ni­ties in T&T is an area of ma­jor fo­cus for us at TSTT," the com­pa­ny's of­fi­cers ex­plain the project in more mod­er­ate terms.

In terms of in­fra­struc­ture, 10,000 homes in T&T are ready for the di­rect fi­bre-op­tic con­nec­tions that gi­ga­bit con­nec­tiv­i­ty re­quires, though the com­pa­ny not­ed that hav­ing the ca­bling avail­able doesn't guar­an­tee that gi­ga­bit speeds will al­ways be pos­si­ble on every fi­bre-op­tic con­nec­tion.

A gi­ga­bit con­nec­tion runs at 1,000 megabits, or ten times the speed of the fastest cur­rent con­nec­tion in T&T. It's al­so the first con­nec­tion to be pro­mot­ed as sym­met­ri­cal, which means that up­load speeds are sup­posed to be as fast as down­loads.

The first 10,000 homes are most­ly in the north­west of the is­land, but 30 per cent of the con­nec­tions run to Bel Air in south Trinidad and Or­chid Gar­dens in cen­tral Trinidad. That's part of the in­fra­struc­ture up­grades that the com­pa­ny has been pur­su­ing over the last four years. TSTT hopes to have 40,000 homes ready for fi­bre-op­tic con­nec­tions by the end of 2014.

Lega­cy Hous­ing got the nod for the pi­lot project at least part­ly be­cause it was un­der con­struc­tion and at the launch, still was, with con­crete be­ing poured at sev­er­al sites with­in the de­vel­op­ment while nat­ti­ly-clad guests made their way to the mod­el home that serves as the prov­ing ground for the tech­nol­o­gy de­ploy­ment.

That al­lowed TSTT's tech­ni­cal teams ready ac­cess to the un­der­ground duct­ing on the site and the homes, built with fu­ture tech­nol­o­gy in mind, prov­ing very easy to wire.

Un­der­ground duct­ing is best prac­tice for a fi­bre-op­tic de­ploy­ment and HDC de­vel­op­ments are com­pli­ant. TSTT hopes to have dis­cus­sions with de­vel­op­ers work­ing on cur­rent sites to win space in their duct pipes.

To­ba­go won't be left out of the de­vel­op­ment loop ei­ther. A new fi­bre-op­tic-ca­ble link to the is­land was laid three years ago, and the com­pa­ny is eval­u­at­ing sites there to es­tab­lish an­oth­er gi­ga­bit com­mu­ni­ty.

Gi­ga­bit com­mu­ni­ties are a use­ful de­vel­op­men­tal bench­mark for na­tions catch­ing up with the glob­al pace of broad­band de­ploy­ment, but they are not the on­ly one. A na­tion's ca­pac­i­ty to par­tic­i­pate in dig­i­tal net­works is bet­ter mea­sured by the num­ber of con­nec­tions per capi­ta that run to ten megabits or bet­ter.

In his ad­dress last week, TSTT's act­ing CEO George Hill de­scribed the project as a first in not just T&T, but al­so in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean. It's all part of TSTT's new five-year strate­gic plan, one pil­lar of which is the pro­vi­sion of broad­band ser­vice to 95 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion.

"We have a num­ber of tools and pipelines through which we can pro­vide that," said Hill, "and a gi­ga­bit In­ter­net con­nec­tion is just one of them."

Of the Lega­cy Hous­ing pi­lot project, Hill not­ed that it's "both a tri­al and a part­ner­ship in un­der­stand­ing the prod­uct.

"We will de­sign pack­ages to suit lifestyles as this project helps us to un­der­stand bet­ter how cus­tomers make use of the ca­pac­i­ty."

The project will run for at least six months.

"TSTT had a lead­ing role in telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions in the re­gion," Hill said, "and we want to get back to that as soon as pos­si­ble."

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