By Al Edwards, Financial Gleaner EditorINTERGRATED TELECOMS service provider, Cable & Wireless Jamaica (C&WJ) is now declaring that it has the best mobile coverage on the island.
Speaking with the Financial Gleaner yesterday, C&WJ's Chief Operation Officer (COO) Sean Bryan said: "Not too long ago we said that we would be making an $800 million investment in our mobile division in order to upgrade the capacity of our network. This meant overlaying our current GSM/GPRS 1900 megahertz high frequency system with a lower frequency 850 megahertz signal. We announced that this would be completed by July 1. We completed 135 overlays ahead of schedule and we can now say that we have the best coverage on the island. This now means that customers can make the best of our GPRS offerings. We will now concentrate on rolling out our new products. Recently we introduced the Blackberry handset to our customers. We are delivering on our promise to deliver to our customers a better GSM coverage."
Mr. Bryan said that the company's new mantra is coverage, capacity and reliability. Dropped calls have been a problem but the CEO said that it is being addressed. He has instigated a failure analysis exercise which sees the company taking a proactive approach to capacity on the network. "We can identify exactly where demand any where in the country is going up and act accordingly."
Over the last seven years, C&WJ has spent some $16 Billion on its mobile network. This Mr. Bryan sees as an indication of its commitment in terms of financial backing. Last month its main mobile rival, Digicel declared that it now has in excess of 1.1 million customers. Mr. Brayn would be not be drawn into comment on what customer target has been set for this year but made it clear that its network capacity can now more than handle that target. " I tell you what, we will not be victims of our success."
C&WJ now expects an increase in data traffic and is anticipating significant growth among its corporate customers
" Corporate customers are data centred. The increased in-building penetration offered by the new system will give corporate customers greater flexibility to transmit data using their mobile handsets,' said C&WJ's vice-president with responsibility for mobile services, Ian Neita.
C&WJ is planning on launching a further 35 1900 megahertz cites by November of this year. This now means that the company now has more than 400 1900-megahertz cites, 135 850-megahertz cites and 170 TDMA cites.
