“We feel vindicated.”
This was the expression uttered by Ag CEO of TSTT Lisa Agard when asked to comment on winning the recent Appeal court battle against its rival Digicel.
In an interview with the Sunday Business Guardian, Agard said: “The court of appeal upheld all of our submissions.”
Delivering an oral judgement during a virtual hearing, Appellate Judges Prakash Moosai and Vasheist Kokaram upheld a high court judge’s decision to refer the dispute to the Telecommunications Authority of T&T (TATT).
Kokaram said: “There is no reason why the regulator cannot provide urgent and final reliefs.” He also noted that the resolution of the dispute by TATT was necessary as number porting is critical to having a competitive telecommunications market.
Digicel initially filed a court injunction against TSTT to stop its rejection of thousands of their subscribers wishing to port their numbers to the Digicel network.
In that initial case, Justice Nadia Kangaloo decided to defer to TATT as a specialist body with technical knowledge. Kokaram agreed with Kangaloo’s decision noting that it was an appropriate exercise of her judicial discretion.
Agard expressed that TSTT was happy with the decision and feels confident about the matter being shifted into the purview of TATT.
However, the former CFO of TSTT and the current general manager, shared services Gerard Cooper said that because the company has pledged to keep people connected to broadband services; their cash collections are strained.
After TSTT sent home over 500 employees in 2018 year in a restructuring exercise, the company made a net loss of $1.15 billion. Cooper noted the main purpose or the major initiative in that restructuring in 2018 was to re-align TSTT’s efficiency in ratios pertaining to its labour cost and “that was achieved in part.”
He continued: “Of course, subsequent to that we have had since April, this year with the COVID, that has impacted business significantly.”
Cooper indicated that although the company has a noticeable downward trajectory in relation to industry benchmarks for labour costs, the challenge was ultimately related to revenues and more importantly—its collections.
He said: “‘Cause it’s one thing for people to say, it’s a good time for telecos, everybody is home and they’re working from home - but the challenge is you can have all the ink on paper but at the end of the day it’s the collections.”
Cooper highlighted that like many organisations TSTT pledged not to disconnect because broadband is effectively like the air that is breathed.
The general manager for share services disclosed: “At significant costs to us, we did make certain pledges in terms of keeping our customers on, despite payments. That has impacted the business both from a revenue but more importantly from the cash point.”
As a result of this Cooper expressed that TSTT was and continues to be impacted by COVID-19 and it expects a turnaround in the next financial year or two.
Copper stated: “But this financial year, just like many other organisations, would be or was, negative.”
In spite of its difficult financial position, TSTT celebrated the fact that it experienced consistent fixed-line access to the Internet in the midst of a nationwide Internet disruption that occurred on December 7, 2020.
According to TATT, on that day it noted that the problem arose due to a disruption of an international cable link, which transpired because of a nationwide power outage in Curaçao.
In a release on that day, TSTT indicated that it had been able to maintain access to the Internet to all of its fixed-line customers because it had invested in expanding its subsea networks.
Agard said these subsea cables transport internet traffic efficiently from T&T to the United States.
Currently, these subsea cables are a critical part of the telecommunications infrastructure that enables consumers in T&T to access the internet.
There are currently four internet cable systems running from out of T&T to Florida and New York. These cables are as follows:
Global Caribbean Network/Southern Caribbean Fiber (GCN/SCF) routed to Florida (FL) and New York (NW),
Columbus routed to FL, Americas II routed to FL and
Eastern Caribbean Fibre System (ECFS)/ CBUS routed to NY.
Also speaking to the Sunday Business Guardian was TSTT Ag chief technology officer Kenrick Garcia who indicated that the company has partnerships with Google and other providers that enables them to store the data locally on TSTT’s servers.
“So when you make a request for some item maybe on Google, Facebook or whatever, that doesn’t necessarily mean it goes off-island and on to the US” via the subsea systems.
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He explained that when an internet user searches for something locally there is an internal system prompt that asks: is that information you are requesting here?
“If it’s not, then it says okay, send you out to the internet, but the other user that comes to request the same information, he remains on-island. So what we tried to do is balance the traffic and bring the information closer to the users in the event that there is some disaster or some sort of emergency (as what happened).”
According to Garcia, this means that the internet consumer would be able to access the information locally because current data is always being refreshed. However, this only applies to some of the larger applications like YouTube, Facebook and Google.
The TSTT executives also indicated that by designing the infrastructure in this way, it takes the load off of its subsea cables that are expensive to manage and maintain.
Agard said: “There are two of them that we are part owners of Americas II and ECFS.” She explained that normally, a consortium of telecom operators would agree to invest in a submarine cable system and then respective companies would pay for the building and the maintenance of these networks according to the percentage of their ownership.
For the cables, in which TSTT does not own a stake (GCN/SCF and Columbus) Agard highlighted that the company has 15-year lease agreements to the infrastructure. She also indicated that over the years the company would have spent billions on the creation of and diversification to these cables.
Agard added, “None of the other operators have either ownership and/or lease arrangements in all of the four cable systems; we are the only one.”
This establishes route diversity for TSTT.
It means that when the blackout in last week had impaired the access to the Columbus subsea cable (that is owned by Liberty Global, of which Flow is a subsidiary) TSTT still had 65 per cent of its capacity on which enabled it to provide its customers with access to the Internet.
Agard added, “So what we saw on Monday was the manifestation of the foresight of TSTT in executing our strategy of route diversity that meant that our customers did not lose access to the internet and that our customers were not affected—on the fixed side.”
She also noted that last week, “it was the incumbent telecommunications provider the one that is owned by the people of T&T is the one that stood out.”
However, TSTT acknowledged that its customers faced speed challenges and difficulties accessing the internet via mobile data because of damage to the submarine fibre cables located in the Eastern Caribbean.
It also added that this was because mobile internet customers who would customarily split their internet usage between the two mobile networks were utilising their bmobile network exclusively.
The TSTT team noted that the company had to contact its vendors to increase the number of transactions and concurrent sessions on the mobile network to ease the congestion that mobile customers experienced. After conducting this commercial transaction TSTT noted that its mobile network had enough capacity to facilitate the demand for data and to provide normal browsing speed.