“Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot”
– Camelot Reprise, lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner
In the late 1990s, when Barbados had a Prime Minister whose mission was to make the country more competitive, and who actually led his troops into battle in his various campaigns, the country broke the shackles of the Cable & Wireless monopoly.
When the market opened up – for everything except landlines – we got two new entrants for the fast-emerging mobile sector, but one left the Caribbean soon after. So we ended up with just one new player, whose name became the stuff of legend. Digicel.
Then one day, the mobile phone industry around the globe changed.
It was that day in 2007 when a man in California held up a small, fairly thin, oblong thing he called an iPhone and said it was three things.
It was a mobile phone, an iPod music player (remember those?), and a computer with full Internet. All in one.
The goal, said Steve Jobs, was to sell ten million of them in the first year. You can go check the stats for me but all I know is that it sold a few more than that. More importantly, it changed telecom history.
The smartphone, born amid howls of derision that it would not last, went on to become the fastest-growing and most profitable side of the phone business, and then led to everything in-between the laptop and itself, including the iPad/tablet and the “phablet”.
The hybrid computer/phone business transformed the networks they relied on into much more than mere phone companies.
For them, Cable & Wireless Communications Plc included, the Holy Grail is to become a four-headed monster, dominating their landscapes in landlines, mobile phones, broadband Internet, and pay-TV.
I forgot to mention the strange story of a soon-to-be-consumed company called Columbus.
Two enterprising Canadians, you see, decided that it would be a good little business for them if they went around the small towns of rural Canada where no major company would bother going and hook them all up to the Internet.
Well, that’s what I remember of the backstory, and even if that’s not exactly it, the point is they were not even thinking of the Caribbean.
Then – I forget how – they got a little business going in Jamaica and realised that they had a lot of cable to lay under the sea, because nobody else was doing it. Sounds really boring to me. But they persevered and in two-two’s, they had the whole Caribbean “Basin” connected – with fibre optic cable – and even Cable & Wireless and Digicel, plus all of the other telecoms around the region and Central America, had to buy “capacity” from them, as they could sell it cheaper than the cost of going up onto satellites.
The more data you wanted to upload or download, the more Columbus you needed.
Then Columbus decided it would not stay in the back room diligently connecting all this traffic to other traffic, so it went into the front-end pay-TV business, buying up similar businesses along the way.
I really don’t know if the intention was ever to build this great stand-alone company that would compete with, and maybe one day eclipse, Cable & Wireless, or if the idea all along was just to move into the sleeping giant’s territory and give him one hell of a fright when he awoke.
The sleeping giant did awake, and after sizing up its prey for some time (no doubt with the prey’s help), it struck. You think you were stunned? Digicel gave the impression the region had been swallowed up by an undersea earthquake, and in a sense it has. In a statement released Thursday afternoon, the company said that it was “naturally concerned” about “the likely resultant impact on the telecoms market in the region.”
It’s not going to be good. Digicel said it wanted to be given “a full and fair opportunity to engage in the approvals process . . . to ensure that fair and vibrant competition is maintained in the Caribbean region and that the interests of Caribbean consumers are fully protected.”
I think that ship has sailed. I would like to think that there might be regulatory authorities in this region who would be brave enough to stop this consumer-unfriendly deal on the grounds that it would create a much larger and more powerful monopoly than anything ever seen before in this region. I would like to think that, but I doubt it would ever be the case.
In good time, I predict, CWC will also turn its big guns on the former upstart who had the gumption to build out a mobile market right under its nose.
We have had our “one brief, shining moment,” when it seemed that competition could remain alive in the telecoms sector, keeping prices in check for the consumer. Alas, our Camelot era in telecoms is over. It was probably too good to be true – or to last very long.
And so, 15 years or so after it was dismantled, the Cable & Wireless monopoly has started to re-emerge. And this time, nobody will stop it.
