Trinidad and To­ba­go has the num­ber one mo­bile net­work pop­u­la­tion cov­er­age in the world, a sur­vey by the World Eco­nom­ic Fo­rum has said.The Glob­al In­for­ma­tion and Tech­nol­o­gy Re­port said the fact that there are 135 mo­bile tele­phones for every 100 cit­i­zens of this coun­try, this coun­try is num­ber one in the world.The re­port was re­leased at the Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness in Mt Hope yes­ter­day.

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The Net­work Readi­ness In­dex's third pil­lar is in­fra­struc­ture and dig­i­tal con­tent, un­der which T&T is ranked num­ber one in the cat­e­go­ry "Mo­bile net­work cov­er­age, as a per­cent­age of the pop­u­la­tion."On hand to re­ceive the good news was TSTT's ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent Trevor Deane who said: "That's the dif­fer­ence be­tween cov­er­age and pen­e­tra­tion. Pen­e­tra­tion is very high. It means every­body who wants a phone can ac­cess a phone. It means every­body who wants ac­cess to the In­ter­net can have ac­cess to the In­ter­net."

He said: "We, as well as our com­peti­tors cov­er most of the coun­try. That is re­port­ed, I be­lieve, by the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (TATT). You may not get cov­er­age in some spe­cif­ic ar­eas. You may not get cov­er­age in your house, in a par­tic­u­lar bed­room."No net­work can pro­vide 100 per cent cov­er­age every­where, wher­ev­er you are, all the time. The cov­er­age that we have com­pares to the first world.

"It's some­thing that's evolv­ing. Every year, we im­prove our net­work. Even­tu­al­ly it will be miles bet­ter than every­one else. It does need time."In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Dr Rolph Bal­go­b­in said T&T, be­cause of its wealth and high­ly ed­u­cat­ed peo­ple, is grouped with big­ger and more de­vel­oped coun­tries like Sin­ga­pore.

Bal­go­b­in said T&T fell 12 points be­cause two new coun­tries were added in­to the sur­vey and they were placed above T&T, in which case, the coun­try fell in re­al terms by ten places.As for the ten-place slide, Bal­go­b­in said it doesn't mean that T&T has gone back­ward tech­no­log­i­cal­ly, he said."It just means rel­a­tive to every­one else, they (every­body else) are pro­gress­ing a bit faster than we are. This is true through­out Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean," he said.

Asked why he thought Bar­ba­dos (rank 39 out of 144 coun­tries) is so much high­er than T&T (72 out of 144) in the over­all rank­ing be­cause of the in­sti­tu­tion­al frame­work that Bar­ba­dos has put in place.Their ef­forts at im­prov­ing tech­nolo­gies in busi­ness, he said, has paid off.Asked if he agreed that per­sons on a good mo­bile net­work would not need two phones, he said: "Ex­act­ly. Yes, but again, that's some­thing that we got very wrong."

For ex­am­ple, he said that while sit­ting on board of the e-busi­ness round­table, he said the state should set up a com­pa­ny, and that the state build the cell tow­ers and al­low TSTT and Dig­i­cel to co-host."In­stead what hap­pened was that TSTT built out a net­work. Dig­i­cel built out a net­work."Nei­ther of them built out a great net­work, so what you have is re­al­ly two net­works with two dif­fer­ent sets of tow­ers for each side, cov­er­ing ex­act­ly the same area."

He said: "You just need one tow­er and that could han­dle the trans­mit­ters for both com­pa­nies on. He said he is an ad­vo­cate for shared tow­ers but the horse has bolt­ed with that one."Chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the Na­tion­al In­for­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) Com­pa­ny (iGovTT) Adam Montserin said a new ICT plan is com­ing as it has been sub­mit­ted to Cab­i­net al­ready.

He con­firmed that the plan in­cludes clear tar­gets to im­prove T&T's high-speed broad­band in­ter­net ac­cess but would not share de­tails be­fore the prime min­is­ter.Re­pub­lic Bank ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor Der­win How­ell took is­sue with the abil­i­ty of the gov­ern­ment to come up with nice names like igovtt, fast­for­ward and ttcon­nect, but not with any ac­tion.

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