ULTIMATELY, WHERE THIS business is going is obviously digital neighbourhoods, digital societies, connected communities and the only way to do that is to ensure that the infrastructure that underpins those technologies and those software platforms are the best anywhere in the world. So we just focus on providing the underlying infrastructure and the propositions to business, government and consumers that will ultimately get us to efficient digital communities, digital jurisdictions that deliver first-world utilities to our developing countries like Barbados.
My vision is ensuring that we have free and fair and well regulated competitive environments in all of the territories that report to me.
My vision is to encourage private-public [sector] partnerships, the evolution that we are seeing in more developed countries to totally digital economies, digital education, digitally based learning management systems in schools, in ensuring that we have as green a society as we can get, and ensuring that the interaction between government services and the government’s customers are done digitally.
For instance, in a digital society appliances are going to be talking to one another and ultimately maybe even to your grocer and telling the grocer that you have run out of orange juice or eggs and that basket of goods shows up on your doorstep by that evening or the next morning.
Machines talking to one another – that’s the kind of society we want to see ultimately right here in the Caribbean – and that can only be created by developing the infrastructure [and] investing in the infrastructure that we have been investing in.
We are definitely focused on creating more and more bundled propositions and delivering those propositions to customers. But the fact that half of our customers are still on single play means that we have not migrated as many of them from their single play propositions to double and triple play.
That, frankly, is a job we have to do better in the future and we are going to have to create the kinds of compelling propositions, given the state of the economy, given people’s affordability levels.
We are going to have to match those better with the double and triple play propositions we want to get up there in the market because that’s clearly the way to go and that’s what’s clearly going to provide consumers with the value that they want, rather than getting these products and services individually.
The first thing we have to make sure is that they can afford all three services in what is a tough economy. And it’s going to be our job to create the propositions that match their ability to afford what it is we are going to have to charge in order to be able to pay back for the huge investments which we have made in the infrastructure.
That is clearly the way of the world, that is where the market is going all over the world and Barbados shouldn’t be any different, given the huge investment we have made in the infrastructure. We are going to have to move at the pace of the economy’s ability to accommodate the rate at which our ambitions suggest we should be doing it, and that’s what we are to do.
Garry Sinclair is president of Cable & Wireless’ Caribbean operations.
