Melis­sa Doughty

The Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (TATT) will soon is­sue a re­quest for pro­pos­als (RFP) for a third mo­bile tele­phone provider. The RFP is ex­pect­ed to be is­sued, pos­si­bly with­in a month.The an­nounce­ment was made yes­ter­day at the au­thor­i­ty's launch of its pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion cam­paign themed Be Alert! Be Aware! Be At­ten­tive! in ob­ser­vance of the 2013 World Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion and In­for­ma­tion So­ci­ety Day.

Min­is­ter of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Dr Ru­pert Grif­fith de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress dur­ing which he made the an­nounce­ment.Grif­fith said along with the RFP for a third provider, the au­thor­i­ty will in­tro­duce num­ber porta­bil­i­ty. This will al­low mo­bile phone users to re­tain their phone num­bers when chang­ing from one net­work op­er­a­tor to an­oth­er. Asked by the T&T Guardian how soon the RFP will be is­sued, Grif­fith said pos­si­bly with­in a month.

The au­thor­i­ty's chair­man, Sel­by Wil­son, who de­liv­ered wel­come re­marks, told the T&T Guardian, "We are cer­tain­ly go­ing out to the mar­ket with an RFP to in­vite oth­er sup­pli­ers to par­tic­i­pate in a bid. Whether we get a pos­i­tive re­sponse or not is left up to the com­mer­cial de­ci­sion of those who will par­tic­i­pate in the bid. We be­lieve that the mar­ket can ac­com­mo­date an­oth­er provider.

"One of the things we are do­ing to en­cour­age par­tic­i­pa­tion in this RFP, we will be of­fer­ing the 700 mega­hertz spec­trum (4G) which is the 4G, and of­fer­ing to the third op­er­a­tor a spec­trum in the 800 band to pro­vide voice ser­vices. So, they would have an op­por­tu­ni­ty to par­tic­i­pate in both voice and da­ta ser­vices.