MORNE ROUGE, Grena­da. Grena­da has be­come one of the five Caribbean na­tions now of­fer­ing up to 100Mbps (Megabits per sec­ond) of broad­band in­ter­net ser­vice to its res­i­dents.

Gail Pur­cell, Coun­try Man­ag­er of FLOW Grena­da, an­nounced on Oc­to­ber 1 that res­i­dents were now re­ceiv­ing two and a half times more speed than were pre­vi­ous­ly avail­able at no ad­di­tion­al cost through the com­pa­ny's Let's Evolve as Peo­ple (LEAP) cam­paign.

Min­is­ter of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Works, Phys­i­cal De­vel­op­ment, Pub­lic Util­i­ties and ICT, Gre­go­ry Bowen, said the an­nounce­ment was a di­rect tes­ti­mo­ny to the gov­ern­ment's con­tin­ued ef­forts to bring broad­band to the peo­ple of Grena­da.

"Our goal is to en­sure that we use broad­band to boost the econ­o­my," Bowen not­ed.

He said gov­ern­ment ser­vices such as on­line pay­ment of tax­es and land reg­istry were now with­in reach with health care and agri­cul­ture be­ing oth­er ar­eas which could take ad­van­tage of faster in­ter­net speeds.

The min­is­ter said Flow's in­creased broad­band of­fer­ing now meant that young peo­ple could stay on Grena­da while work­ing for in­ter­na­tion­al com­pa­nies and be­come cre­ators of con­tent to share with the world. He ac­knowl­edged the im­por­tant part­ner­ship be­tween Colum­bus and the NGO, Bright­path to de­ploy tech­nol­o­gy fo­cused train­ing pro­grammes to as­sist in this ob­jec­tive. He cit­ed the re­cent Bright­Path led mo­bile app cre­ation work­shops as an ap­pro­pri­ate start to build­ing and ex­pand­ing the skills of young­sters.

Rhea Yaw Ching, Colum­bus' cor­po­rate vice pres­i­dent of sales and mar­ket­ing, said Grena­da was very spe­cial to Colum­bus as the is­land was one of the pi­o­neers in the re­gion for the use of ICT. She added that this pi­o­neer­ing spir­it would be fur­ther en­abled as Grena­da would be the pi­lot coun­try for sev­er­al new projects to be rolled out un­der new part­ner­ships with Bright­Path, the Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tion Coun­cil (CXC) and the ed­u­ca­tion­al soft­ware com­pa­ny idoo­dle­soft­ware.

"Re­cent re­ports note that the Caribbean has slipped mar­gin­al­ly in ICT per­for­mance. We must re­mem­ber that we are in com­pe­ti­tion with the world. Colum­bus is com­mit­ted to pro­vid­ing the in­fra­struc­ture to bring the com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage nec­es­sary to launch Grena­da for­ward," Yaw Ching said.

A check for EC$ 500 was pre­sent­ed to Sturl­ing Camp­bell of Bo­ca Sec­ondary School. Camp­bell said the school present­ly has about 20 com­put­ers for the more than 600 stu­dents and the funds would help with the in­fra­struc­tur­al up­grades ahead of their plans to ac­quire more com­put­ers to take ad­van­tage of the free broad­band avail­able from Flow to all schools on is­land.