Mark Lyn­der­say

At an up­scale gat­ed com­mu­ni­ty in Ch­agua­nas yes­ter­day morn­ing, TSTT un­veiled its pi­lot project for gi­ga­bit con­nec­tions to the home.Each of the hous­es in the Lega­cy Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment will be wired us­ing fiber op­tic ca­ble that will car­ry an In­ter­net con­nec­tion clock­ing in at 1,000 megabits of da­ta.It's a speed that act­ing CEO George Hill strug­gled to make re­al for the au­di­ence in at­ten­dance.First, he ex­plained that the speed was "equiv­a­lent to down­load­ing 100 mil­lion char­ac­ters of text in one sec­ond".

Then, he not­ed that it would be pos­si­ble to ef­fort­less­ly stream "five high-de­f­i­n­i­tion videos at the same time on a 1Gb con­nec­tion while still hav­ing room to email and surf the web".Fi­nal­ly, he sug­gest­ed that the con­nec­tion was "equiv­a­lent to us­ing 100 DVD play­ers at the same time".It's a big pipeline to the In­ter­net and changes the dis­cus­sion about con­nec­tiv­i­ty from how fast to what do I do next?It's a ques­tion that the res­i­dents of Lega­cy Hous­ing will be ex­plor­ing dur­ing a tri­al of the ser­vice that's ex­pect­ed to run for at least six months.

Dur­ing that time the res­i­dents will re­port on their use of the ser­vice and ex­pe­ri­ences with it, a process that will guide TSTT on cre­at­ing pack­ages that will be of­fered to the pub­lic.The telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny demon­strat­ed the ser­vice, which in­cor­po­rates much of its Quad­Play ini­tia­tive, to Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Nizam Baksh dur­ing a tour of a mod­el home at the hous­ing com­mu­ni­ty which has been wired to demon­strate an ide­al de­ploy­ment of hard­ware con­nec­tions to the mas­sive pipeline.

TSTT has now pre­pared its in­fra­struc­ture to de­liv­er gi­ga­bit In­ter­net con­nec­tiv­i­ty to 10,000 homes in Trinidad, 70 per cent of which are lo­cat­ed in the north of the coun­try.The com­pa­ny plans to in­crease the num­ber of homes el­i­gi­ble for the ser­vice to 40,000 by the end of 2014.TSTT had no pric­ing for the ser­vice, not­ing that it would cre­ate its pack­ages for the pub­lic af­ter study­ing the re­sults of the Lega­cy Hous­ing project.