Nadaleen Singh

Just weeks af­ter ap­prov­ing the US$3 bil­lion ac­qui­si­tion of Colum­bus In­ter­na­tion­al by Ca­ble and Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (CWC), Phillip Paulwell, Ja­maica's Min­is­ter of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy, En­er­gy and Min­ing, has de­fend­ed the de­ci­sion.

Paulwell, who is in T&T at­tend­ing the Caribbean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union's 25th An­niver­sary ICT Week at the Hy­att Re­gency, said in an ad­dress at the open­ing ses­sion yes­ter­day that the Ja­maican gov­ern­ment put in con­di­tions which will pre­serve com­pe­ti­tion on the is­land.

"We were able, notwith­stand­ing our le­gal de­fi­cien­cy, to ex­tract both from Lime and Flow some com­mit­ments...com­mit­ments that are go­ing to en­sure that our com­pet­i­tive land­scape is main­tained. For ex­am­ple, we are go­ing to have num­ber porta­bil­i­ty by the end of May, we will have core lo­ca­tion agree­ments and be­cause of these things we are see­ing now, at least three new play­ers.

"We be­lieve that there is room for ad­di­tion­al com­pe­ti­tion in Ja­maica and we are en­cour­ag­ing that with the grant­i­ng of new li­cens­es," he said.

In mid-Jan­u­ary, Ja­maica be­came the first coun­try in the re­gion to ap­prove the pro­posed ac­qui­si­tion which is al­so sub­ject to reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals in T&T, Bar­ba­dos, and the Unit­ed States. No ap­proval is need­ed from the reg­u­la­to­ry agency for the East­ern Caribbean, the East­ern Caribbean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty (Ectel), on be­half of Do­mini­ca, Grena­da, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lu­cia, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines.

Paulwell ex­plained: "What I have sought to do is to go be­yond the law and to ex­tract cer­tain con­di­tions, which I'm pleased that the com­pa­ny has ac­cept­ed ful­some­ly, be­cause I want­ed to en­sure that we would pre­serve com­pe­ti­tion as much as pos­si­ble and pro­tect the in­ter­est of the con­sumer."

He said it is up to each coun­try to as­sess their sit­u­a­tion based on their re­spec­tive laws, adding that the time has come to mod­i­fy the tele­co­mu­ni­ca­tions rules.

"I think it is much more ap­pro­pri­ate now for us to in­tro­duce the frame­work that will mon­i­tor ac­qui­si­tions and merg­ers.," he said.

In the fea­ture ad­dress, Grena­da's Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Mitchell called for one re­gion­al space for in­for­ma­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and tech­nol­o­gy (ICT), say­ing once that hap­pened rates might not be as ex­pen­sive.

"We have, sis­ters and broth­ers, to move from di­a­logue and talk to ac­tion. We need to be­come ac­tivists and peo­ple of ac­tion. It is time to move away from the age old ques­tion of who will lead and in­stead ask, who can we fol­low?" he said.

Mitchell said Caribbean na­tions can no longer act in iso­la­tion when it comes to de­vel­op­ing ICT.