Caribbean telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions op­er­a­tors will par­tic­i­pate in a crit­i­cal meet­ing in Mi­a­mi on Fri­day in their on­go­ing quest to have big tech com­pa­nies con­tribute fi­nan­cial­ly to re­gion­al tele­coms net­work in­fra­struc­ture.

This is the sec­ond meet­ing where these op­er­a­tors will ad­dress the im­pact that com­pa­nies like Meta, Google and Net­flix con­tin­ue to have on the re­gion­al telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions in­dus­try.

In a news re­lease, the Caribbean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union (CTU) said it will host the meet­ing at the Sher­a­ton Mi­a­mi Air­port Ho­tel and Ex­ec­u­tive Meet­ing Cen­tre.

CTU not­ed that re­gion­al op­er­a­tors face a sig­nif­i­cant fi­nan­cial bur­den as­so­ci­at­ed with OTT-dri­ven costs, adding that Meta Face­book, In­sta­gram and What­sApp), Al­pha­bet (Google), Tik­Tok, Net­flix, Ama­zon and Mi­crosoft are re­spon­si­ble for 67 per cent of the to­tal in­ter­net traf­fic in the Caribbean.

“De­spite this, the Big Tech/OTT providers make no con­tri­bu­tion or in­vest­ment to lo­cal de­liv­ery net­works. That mar­ket fail­ure is tak­ing place against a back­drop of stalled rev­enues for tel­cos, with lim­it­ed prospects for fu­ture growth.

“By con­trast, OTT providers’ rev­enues grew by over 150 per cent be­tween 2017 and 2021. The ra­tio­nale be­hind OTTs/big tech pay­ing their fair share is to ad­dress this mar­ket fail­ure, en­sure a lev­el play­ing field, and pro­mote the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions in­fra­struc­ture which ben­e­fit the re­gion’s cit­i­zens,” the CTU state­ment added.

Chair of the C6 Work­ing Group and TSTT CEO Lisa Agard said the re­gion­al net­work op­er­a­tors wel­comed and en­dorsed this CTU ini­tia­tive and called on all in­ter­est­ed par­ties, net­work providers, OTT/Big tech play­ers, and re­gion­al pol­i­cy­mak­ers and reg­u­la­tors to par­tic­i­pate ful­ly and in good faith in this process.

“This is about the fu­ture sus­tain­abil­i­ty of the sec­tor and the re­al­i­sa­tion of crit­i­cal con­nec­tiv­i­ty goals for the en­tire re­gion,” she added.

The state­ment added that this sec­ond meet­ing will ad­vance the dis­cus­sion on rec­om­men­da­tions de­vel­oped at the first meet­ing on Feb­ru­ary 17, 2023, fo­cus­ing on three work streams busi­ness/fi­nan­cial/com­mer­cial, tech­ni­cal and reg­u­la­to­ry.

The first stream will analyse the eco­nom­ics of da­ta de­liv­ery in the Caribbean Basin; the sec­ond will seek co­op­er­a­tive ap­proach­es to con­tent de­liv­ery, and the third will con­sid­er reg­u­la­to­ry is­sues.

Ac­cord­ing to the state­ment a re­cent re­port com­mis­sioned on this is­sue showed that OTT-dri­ven traf­fic gen­er­ates an­nu­al costs be­tween US$232 and US$332 mil­lion for Caribbean net­work op­er­a­tors.

It added these could rep­re­sent 45 to 65 per cent of the an­nu­al in­vest­ment in­curred by Caribbean net­work op­er­a­tors and sev­en to 10 per cent of their re­tail rev­enues.

The re­port al­so not­ed that OTT-dri­ven an­nu­al costs are es­ti­mat­ed at be­tween US$34 and US$73 mil­lion in Ja­maica and be­tween US$16 and US$39 mil­lion in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

“The on­ly way in which net­work in­tegri­ty is main­tained is by in­di­vid­ual users and busi­ness­es who bear the cost through da­ta plans and sub­scrip­tions,” the re­port ad­vised.