Nadaleen Singh

One com­mon plat­form for in­for­ma­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) across the Caribbean is high on the agen­da of to­day's in­ter­s­es­sion­al meet­ing of Cari­com Heads in Nas­sau, Ba­hamas. This was con­firmed by Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Min­is­ter Dr Ru­pert Grif­fith who de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress at yes­ter­day's in­au­gur­al meet­ing of T&T's Lead­er­ship Ad­vi­so­ry Coun­cil at Fi­es­ta Plaza, Movie Town.

Asked whether there is po­lit­i­cal will to achieve a sin­gle ICT plat­form in the re­gion, Grif­fith said: "There is a lot of col­lab­o­ra­tion go­ing on with many Caribbean coun­tries with T&T pro­vid­ing the lead­er­ship. We have al­ready tak­en the ini­tia­tive–the In­ter­na­tion­al Ex­change Pro­to­cols which will al­low us to trans­fer high speed da­ta among the Caribbean, with­out hav­ing to go up to North Amer­i­ca which is nor­mal­ly done right now. It is cost ef­fec­tive, it is go­ing to be faster and it will be very much cheap­er to use."

Grif­fith said with up­dat­ed ICT there must be the leg­isla­tive frame­work in place to guide its op­er­a­tion."There are sev­er­al–Cloud tech­nol­o­gy leg­is­la­tion, Cy­ber crime Act, we are re­vis­ing the Tele­coms Act 2002, we are look­ing at the broad­cast­ing code, elec­tron­ic pay­ments and sev­er­al oth­er pieces of en­abling leg­is­la­tion that will en­able the tech­nol­o­gy ini­tia­tives that we are mak­ing."

The min­is­ter al­so gave an up­date on the in­tro­duc­tion of ICT in­to ser­vices pro­vid­ed by the pub­lic sec­tor. "One of the things we are work­ing on right now is the elec­tric pay­ments among gov­ern­ment ser­vices, that's a big one. We are hop­ing by ear­ly next year, we will have elec­tron­ic e-pay­ments on stream with the in­tend­ed leg­is­la­tion and all of the pro­ce­dures in place," he said

Up­date on third mo­bile provider

Asked whether any de­ci­sions have been on the award­ing of a li­cense for a new mo­bile provider, Griffth said: "That mat­ter is be­fore the Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Min­is­ter right now for con­sid­er­a­tion.

The first pro­pos­al was sub­mit­ted in No­vem­ber last year, but there were a lot of clar­i­fi­ca­tions the min­istry need­ed be­fore we make a de­ci­sion. The re­quest we made for ad­di­tion­al in­for­ma­tion came in last week so it is now with us for con­sid­er­a­tion."