How TSTT responded to covid19

BitDepth#1248

“I SAID to one of my teams, we should not let this opportunity go to waste,” said TSTT’s CEO, Dr Ronald Walcott.

“We have to go forward. I don’t see any other conversation making sense.”

Walcott was speaking at an online presentation on Tuesday. The weekly presentations are hosted by CANTO weekly. Tuesday’s topic was:The CEO’s perspective on covid19.

But Walcott isn’t just a business manager, he represents the State’s stake in local telecommunications in what has become a competitive market of three players. The other two, Digicel and Flow/Liberty, are branches of international companies.

In the face of stiff commercial competition, TSTT has recast itself as the provider with a compassionate understanding of the TT character and needs.

That shows up in the company’s language too, as Walcott spoke of adjustments to its “dunning” or disconnection policy, something that Walcott noted “our CFO is always unhappy about.”

The company has put aside a budget of $20-$25 million for customer support initiatives to play its part in helping the nation to manage its challenges during isolation and economic recovery.

The company has, through its network of fibre connections, its old copper network, a mobile 4G LTE network and a fixed wireless (WTTX) network recently upgraded to 5G, managed to cover 95 per cent of the country.

One of the questions the company is now asking internally is, according to Walcott, “If we were to supply TT with 100 per cent broadband, what would happen?”

To create a universal network, the company would, Walcott said, “have to work with the regulator on the edge of the network, which has financial constraints.”

Where the coverage network tends to become spotty in TT is in sparsely populated areas of the country with widely scattered customers.

But it is these customers who most need to be connected to the wider internet and to have their capacities lubricated by a technological advantage.

Bridging that gap is, the TSTT CEO explained, a challenge of physical infrastructure, but it’s one that needs to be met if the country is ever to cross the last major digital divide imposed by geography.

What these weeks of isolation have given TSTT is a window into what a more fully digital TT might look like.

The company is seeing new patterns emerging in its customer base across the range of connection services it offers. Peaks that would normally happen during business hours are now shifting to homes in the afternoon. Instant messaging and other communication apps have increased by multipliers of between 2X and 5X. Teens have begun using more SMS text messaging, a service that was previously in decline. Voice traffic remains flat, as more users make use of voice apps.

Walcott reported a 40 per cent drop in data traffic on mobile devices and a significant increase in use of its new WTTX fixed wireless 5G service, which has surged to deliver two million gigabytes of data per week.

With an increase in interactive use of the internet, there has also been a significant growth in upload traffic.

The company used the 30MHZ spectrum temporarily allocated by TATT for its WTTX network, increasing deployment to 304 of 308 sites. The company is considering the possibility of deploying broadband to former copper-connected customers who are only using voice calls on the service.

“We have had to dimension the network differently,” he said.

“You have to look at the network from the user all the way back to the internet backbone.”

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there