Mark Lyn­der­say

Last week, TSTT in­tro­duced a re­freshed strat­e­gy for mo­bile broad­band for cel­lu­lar phone users at a low-keyed event at the Hy­att Re­gency Trinidad ho­tel, Port-of-Spain. In Sep­tem­ber, the com­pa­ny plans to roll out a new fourth gen­er­a­tion (4G) broad­band da­ta for its bMo­bile net­work based on the HSPA+ pro­to­col. The new mo­bile broad­band ser­vice will cost the com­pa­ny $500 mil­lion to de­ploy. The event fea­tured short sup­port­ive speech­es from the com­pa­ny's brand am­bas­sadors Bri­an Lara and Machel Mon­tano and in the small au­di­ence, the com­pa­ny's newest face, Anya Ay­oung-Chee, be­fore cul­mi­nat­ing in the sign­ing of an agree­ment to sup­ply the tech­nol­o­gy by Chi­nese provider Huawei. TSTT has been run­ning In­ter­net ser­vices to mo­bile phones us­ing 1995 vin­tage GPRS/EDGE-based tech­nol­o­gy, of­ten de­scribed as 2.5G, rat­ed at speeds up to 115k. On the lo­cal net­work ser­vice, usu­al­ly hov­ers be­tween 20 and 50kbps, speeds once as­so­ci­at­ed with di­al-up. Mo­bile phone users hop­ing for speeds more in line with the de­mands of the mod­ern In­ter­net could tap in­to the com­pa­ny's WiMax net­work us­ing a mo­bile hotspot de­vice to con­nect to a mo­bile phone's built-in WiFi con­nec­tion. The mo­bile hotspots ap­peared in TSTT's stores along with the long-await­ed iPhone, but users soon be­gan to com­plain about the spot­ti­ness of the WiMax net­work, heat gen­er­at­ed by the mo­bile hotspot de­vice and the price of ac­cess for the WiMax net­work.

Flag­ging com­mit­ment

Ag­gres­sive dis­counts on iPhone prices and the mo­bile broad­band pric­ing plans soon fol­lowed, but cor­po­rate TSTT's com­mit­ment to the WiMax net­work seemed to be flag­ging less than two years in­to the ser­vice in­tro­duc­tion. With­in months of the in­tro­duc­tion of the new hotspots and the iPhone, TSTT was lim­it­ing new WiMax hotspot cus­tomers to pur­chasers of its smart mo­bile de­vices from Ap­ple and the An­droid plat­form. The WiMax net­work was ap­proach­ing sat­u­ra­tion and there was no cor­po­rate will to ex­pand net­work pro­vi­sion­ing for a tech­nol­o­gy that had quick­ly blown past its sell-by date. Add to these pres­sures the surg­ing ru­mours among the tech­nol­o­gy cognoscen­ti that the com­pa­ny's ri­val Dig­i­cel was look­ing to get in­to the mo­bile broad­band mar­ket with its own of­fer­ing. There was a clear need to not just take ac­tion, but to be seen to be tak­ing ac­tion. That road brought the me­dia to the Hy­att, but TSTT is long months from im­ple­ment­ing its HSPA+ net­work for mo­bile de­vices with its tech­nol­o­gy part­ner. In­sis­tent in­sid­er buzz sug­gests that Dig­i­cel will be ready to launch much soon­er than that.

Sig­nif­i­cant re­wards

In that con­text, it was quite brave of Lisa Agard, ex­ec­u­tive vice-pres­i­dent for bMo­bile ser­vices and re­tail dis­tri­b­u­tion, to trash-talk the com­pe­ti­tion at the launch of the new ser­vice strat­e­gy, de­scrib­ing TSTT as demon­strat­ing "a nim­ble­ness and vi­sion for the fu­ture of tele­coms in T&T that is at odds with our flat-foot­ed in­dus­try com­pa­tri­ots." Those are fight­ing words. TSTT is some dis­tance from putting even blanks in­to the fir­ing pis­tol of this par­tic­u­lar broad­band race. It's al­so a mar­ket that is like­ly to bring sig­nif­i­cant re­wards to the first mover. No doubt aware of this com­pet­i­tive dan­ger, TSTT an­nounced that it will roll out as many as 30 free WiMax-pow­ered WiFi net­works in pop­u­lar lim­ing spots from Ju­ly 2012. Cus­tomers ir­ri­tat­ed by the toasty WiMax hotspot don­gles will now be able to ac­cess fast net­work speeds while coast­ing a lime, but the ser­vice will be re­strict­ed to cur­rent TSTT's cus­tomers with ei­ther pre- or post-paid ac­counts, Blink Broad­band and Blink-on-the-go (WiMax) cus­tomers.

Qual­i­fy­ing users of TSTT's ser­vices will be able to sign up for the new free prod­uct by reg­is­ter­ing to use it on­line. Agard al­so de­scribed down­load con­nec­tion rates that will be as much as ten times faster than be­fore. In re­sponse to an e-mailed ques­tion about this, TSTT is un­will­ing to com­mit to a spe­cif­ic tar­get speed for the new ser­vice un­til it is ready to launch. How­ev­er, it con­firmed that the ser­vice will of­fer speeds ten times faster than its ex­ist­ing 2.5G net­work. That won't ex­cite many of the tech­nol­o­gy faith­ful, since that sounds dan­ger­ous­ly like a one megabit con­nec­tion. Still, HSPA+ is ca­pa­ble, in very high-end in­stal­la­tions with com­pat­i­ble hard­ware, of as much as 168Mbps, though most com­mon in­stal­la­tions de­liv­er peak speeds of 20Mbps. Be­yond the bold diss­ing of Dig­i­cel, there were pre­cious lit­tle de­tails about the new project, which will take ad­van­tage of re­cent in­fra­struc­ture im­prove­ments in con­nec­tiv­i­ty to 96 per cent of the com­pa­ny's cell tow­ers, which are now con­nect­ed to sub­sta­tions and switch­es by fi­bre op­tic ca­ble in both dense and rur­al ar­eas.

Evo­lu­tion tech­nol­o­gy

The com­pa­ny was al­so un­will­ing to com­mit to sup­port for old­er 3G ca­pa­ble de­vices and will on­ly promise that it will be mak­ing new de­vices avail­able which will make full use of the HSPA+ net­work. As a tech­nol­o­gy, HSPA+ is re­gard­ed as an evo­lu­tion tech­nol­o­gy for old­er 3G ca­pa­ble phones and such phones are tech­ni­cal­ly ca­pa­ble of be­ing con­nect­ed to the new­er net­work. TSTT is al­so still to prove that it is ca­pa­ble of break­ing a streak of mo­bile broad­band ser­vice dis­ap­point­ments. The com­pa­ny in­tro­duced a CD­MA-based EV­DO net­work for lap­top de­vices in 2005 (http://ow.ly/at­d­Wm) that promised mo­bile con­nec­tiv­i­ty for road war­riors. In less than two years, the net­work had be­come so sat­u­rat­ed with traf­fic that the com­pa­ny closed it to new cus­tomers. In 2010, the com­pa­ny in­tro­duced a CD­MA WiMax net­work (http://ow.ly/ate2j) to ad­dress the same needs and with­in 18 months had stopped ad­ver­tis­ing the ser­vice and be­gan re­strict­ing sales to iPhone and An­droid cus­tomers. These two net­works ad­dressed a small slice of its cus­tomer base in­ter­est­ed in mo­bile broad­band for busi­ness or lifestyle ac­cess and TSTT couldn't keep up with the de­mand.

Asked whether the com­pa­ny had in­vest­ed in the type of band­width pro­vi­sion­ing nec­es­sary to meet the needs of the gen­er­al pub­lic, now primed to ex­pect broad­band to the hand­set as a re­quire­ment of mod­ern con­nec­tiv­i­ty and not a lux­u­ry, TSTT re­spond­ed: "Part of the ad­van­tage of us­ing Huawei as our tech­nol­o­gy part­ner is that they have built 4G-ready net­works in some of the largest mar­kets in the world." "With their ex­per­tise and our past ex­pe­ri­ences with new net­work de­vel­op­ment, our goal is to meet the ser­vice de­mands of all of our cus­tomers." Huawei al­so built the WiMax net­work for TSTT, but the com­pa­ny de­scribed the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion as "due to in­vest­ment de­ci­sions, not [the] per­for­mance of the man­u­fac­tur­er." The next six months will pose the strongest chal­lenge that the in­cum­bent telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny will face since Dig­i­cel an­nounced its pres­ence in 2005. So far, TSTT has proved to be one of the few Ca­ble and Wire­less af­fil­i­ates to re­sist the pres­ence of the Irish telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider in the Caribbean, but mo­bile broad­band might well prove to be a wa­ter­shed tech­nol­o­gy for the lo­cal cel­lu­lar mar­ket.

Wire­less TV

Un­named com­peti­tors in the cel­lu­lar mar­ket aren't the on­ly ri­vals that TSTT will be draw­ing a bead on in the im­me­di­ate fu­ture. The com­pa­ny plans to in­tro­duce a $95 wire­less IPTV ver­sion of its suite of ca­ble chan­nels. The com­mer­cial tar­get seems to be less Flow than Di­recTV and per­haps even Green­Dot, a small In­ter­net and IPTV provider, both of whom de­liv­er their prod­uct wire­less­ly. Cus­tomers will be sup­plied by TSTT with an ex­ter­nal an­ten­na and set top box. The ser­vice is de­scribed as a com­pet­i­tive op­tion to ca­ble TV in the home.

Spec­trum re­turn

The com­pa­ny al­so an­nounced that by the end of May, "tens of thou­sands of cus­tomers" would be sup­plied with new hand­sets to re­place de­vices which will be af­fect­ed by the re­turn of the 1800mhz spec­trum to the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T. The com­pa­ny de­clined to dis­close ex­act num­bers on those af­fect­ed by the fre­quen­cy re­al­lo­ca­tion, but the hand­set swap will cost the com­pa­ny mil­lions.