Ger­ard Best

Caribbean gov­ern­ments andt­elecom­mu­ni­ca­tions reg­u­la­tors will meet next month to dis­cuss is­sues re­lat­ed to the man­age­ment of spec­trum across the re­gion.

The Har­monised Caribbean Spec­trum Plan­ning and Man­age­ment project, or­gan­ised by the Caribbean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union (CTU), will bring to­geth­er a range of stake­hold­ers to build on the CTU's work from 2006 to 2010 in re­form­ing spec­trum man­age­ment poli­cies and prac­tices.

At the project launch in Ja­maica on De­cem­ber 5th, 2013, the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB) an­nounced an agreee­ment to pro­vide US$1M fund­ing to the CTU project, which is be­ing un­der­tak­en with tech­ni­cal co­op­er­a­tion sup­port from Com­pete Caribbean, the Gov­ern­ment of Cana­da and the De­part­ment for In­ter­na­tion­al De­vel­op­ment (DFID) of the UK.

Bernadette Lewis, CTU Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al, said in her open­ing re­marks, "To­day's wire­less tech­nolo­gies are more so­phis­ti­cat­ed and ef­fi­cient in their use of spec­trum and the tra­di­tion­al spec­trum man­age­ment poli­cies in use in the re­gion are lim­it­ing the speed of pro­lif­er­a­tion and the full re­al­i­sa­tion of the ben­e­fits of these tech­nolo­gies."

Al­so mak­ing pre­sen­ta­tions at the launch cer­e­mo­ny were Ju­lian Robin­son, Ja­maican Min­is­ter of State in the Min­istry of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy, En­er­gy and Min­ing, and Robert Nel­son, Chief En­gi­neer of the In­ter­na­tion­al Bu­reau of the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion of the USA.

The project's re­gion­al steer­ing com­mit­tee and tech­ni­cal task force were es­tab­lished and a 2014 work plan was for­mu­lat­ed.

"On its com­ple­tion in 2015, the project will es­tab­lish a plan with re­gion­al­ly har­monised rec­om­men­da­tions to ad­dress such ar­eas as min­imi­sa­tion of cross bor­der ra­dio in­ter­fer­ence, tech­ni­cal and pol­i­cy ap­proach­es to dig­i­tal broad­cast­ing, spec­trum pric­ing, fre­quen­cy al­lot­ments for com­mer­cial wire­less ser­vices, pub­lic safe­ty and dis­as­ter/emer­gency com­mu­ni­ca­tions," a post-launch re­lease from the CTU said.