Nadaleen Singh

The Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (TATT) is mov­ing ahead with plans to is­sue a third mo­bile li­cence, ac­cord­ing to the act­ing CEO of the lo­cal telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions reg­u­la­tor, Cyn­thia Red­dock-Downes.

Red­dock-Downes, who as­sumed the po­si­tion in ear­ly May, said on Wednes­day that there was need for more com­pe­ti­tion in the mo­bile mar­ket and that in­creased com­pe­ti­tion in mo­bile would come when the li­cence for the third mo­bile provider is award­ed lat­er this year.

She was speak­ing at TATT's recog­ni­tion of World Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and In­for­ma­tion So­ci­ety Day, 2016 which was held at TATT's Barataria head­quar­ters.

"We have quite a bit of com­pe­ti­tion in fixed-we have not on­ly TSTT, we have Flow and Dig­i­cel and a num­ber of small providers to pro­vide ser­vices not on­ly to res­i­dents but to busi­ness­es as well," said Red­dock-Downes.

She said: "With re­gard to pay-TV ser­vices, I think there is a con­sid­er­able amount of com­pe­ti­tion in the mar­ket, so what we would be do­ing now is con­cen­trat­ing on qual­i­ty of ser­vice is­sues. It would not be about lib­er­al­i­sa­tion again. It is more about what is the qual­i­ty of ser­vice that they are pro­vid­ing. Are they giv­ing you the speeds that they are go­ing to be giv­ing you with re­gard to the In­ter­net? Are they pro­vid­ing re­spon­sive ser­vice with­in two or three days?"

And with more providers com­ing in­to the tele­com mar­ket, she said TATT is work­ing on amend­ments to the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Act and hopes that those amend­ments would find their way on to gov­ern­ment's leg­isla­tive agen­da soon. She said the leg­is­la­tion in place is 12 year old.

Re­fer­ring to TATT's na­tion­al WiFi ini­tia­tive she said al­ready the au­thor­i­ty, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with PTSC, has in­stalled WiFi on bus­es. The sec­ond phase ac­cord­ing to Downes, in­volves bring­ing WiFi to oth­er parts of the coun­try like health cen­tres.

Ex­plain­ing the im­por­tance of the event, she said this year's event was cen­tred around en­tre­pre­neur­ship and that the In­ter­na­tion­al Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union se­lect­ed the theme: "ICT En­tre­pre­neur­ship for So­cial Im­pact."

Al­so speak­ing at the event was Niko­las­ki Ali, who is a board mem­ber at TATT. He said: "Since the in­tro­duc­tion of mo­bile broad­band there has been ex­cep­tion­al growth in us­age from 75,444 sub­scrip­tions in 2012 to 433,915 or just over 575 per cent as at the end of De­cem­ber 2015. It can there­fore be ar­guably said that T&T is a smart­phone na­tion."

Con­cern­ing mo­bile sub­scrip­tions he said: "Sta­tis­tics from our op­er­a­tors tell us that there were ap­prox­i­mate­ly 1,525,576 mo­bile voice sub­scrip­tions with In­ter­net ac­cess in 2015."