Nadaleen Singh

Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions gi­ant Dig­i­cel, which has a 55 per cent mar­ket share of the T&T mar­ket, is not in­ter­est­ed in ac­quir­ing Ca­ble and Wire­less' shares in ri­val TSTT, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer John Delves said yes­ter­day.

"We don't op­er­ate in any busi­ness where we don't have full man­age­ment con­trol. We do have lo­cal part­ners which are very im­por­tant in sev­er­al of our mar­kets and give great ad­vice. We be­lieve in our man­age­ment team and our knowl­edge of tele­com and we want to be in a po­si­tion where we con­trol that, so we won't be in­ter­est­ed. We are in­ter­est­ed in in­vest­ing in Dig­i­cel T&T," he told re­porters at a break­fast meet­ing Jaf­fa's in Port-of-Spain.

Delves said Dig­i­cel is al­ways look­ing for op­por­tu­ni­ties to ex­pand whether it is an ac­qui­si­tion or in­vest­ment in new tech­nol­o­gy.He said the sev­en and a half years the com­pa­ny has been in T&T trends have shown there is an in­crease in de­mand for the da­ta as­pect of Dig­i­cel's busi­ness.

"What we are see­ing as a trend across all of our mar­kets is a huge surge in da­ta. In the last 12 months end­ed March 31, da­ta ac­count­ed for 23 per cent of our rev­enue and that grew 20 per cent year on year. From what we are see­ing here in T&T...we are see­ing huge growth come in on da­ta, as we see smart­phones pen­e­tra­tion."To keep up with com­pe­ti­tion, Delves re­vealed, Dig­i­cel was in­vest­ing more in its net­work.

"Specif­i­cal­ly in T&T we have in­vest­ed over TT$1.5 bil­lion since we have been here sev­en and a half years, This year we are in­vest­ing over $100 mil­lion to im­prove our net­work (on the 4G net­work)."What we have to do as a busi­ness is make sure we're match­ing the speed of the net­work, with in­vest­ment in it."

Delves al­so spoke about the com­pa­ny's plans to in­tro­duce cloud com­put­ing to T&T since it pro­vides se­cu­ri­ty for da­ta and mo­bil­i­ty. It was launched five weeks ago."It is very new in the mar­ket place. We are cur­rent­ly de­vel­op­ing a lot of leads, we have had meet­ings with over 100 busi­ness­es at this stage and there is re­al­ly a lot of in­ter­est. You can save 40 to 50 per cent for busi­ness­es go­ing for­ward."

He said small and large com­pa­nies had ex­pressed in­ter­est in Cloud com­put­ing: "We're very close to sign­ing one deal at the mo­ment and that's with an ex­treme­ly large com­pa­ny."Delves said Dig­i­cel was al­so in­ter­est­ed in bring­ing long-term evo­lu­tion (LTE) to T&T and was look­ing at re­spond­ing to the re­quest for pro­pos­als (RFP) is­sued by the Tele­coms Au­thor­i­ty of T&T."We are cur­rent­ly re­view­ing that doc­u­ment that has been is­sued with TATT. We are go­ing to make sure we are at the fore­front of tech­nol­o­gy.

"Ba­si­cal­ly it's what they call a beau­ty con­test, so they will find a cri­te­ria and then you put in your best bid based on their cri­te­ria, which in­volves things like cov­er­age, speed of roam­ing."The LTE is the fu­ture. We're the first op­er­a­tor in the Caribbean to bring LTE. We have knowl­edge and his­to­ry in LTE and hope­ful­ly that should go in our favour," Delves said.Dead­line for the RFP ends on March 21, 2014.