Huawei's DigitalTT day delivers fuzzy thinking

BitDepth#1329

MARK LYNDERSAY

ON ITS 15th anniversary as a telecommunications infrastructure provider in Trinidad and Tobago, Huawei hosted a discussion on DigitalTT at the Hyatt Regency on Wednesday.

The company has been aggressive about demonstrating its capacity to enable connective technologies and the concept of a smart city in previous presentations, but chose to take a backseat at this event.

Stakeholders had an opportunity to discuss strategy and to hear from independent professionals like Alejandro Adamowicz, regional strategic engagement and technology director, GSMA Latin America.

The GSMA places TT in third place for digital infrastructure in Latin America with fixed broad penetration in households of 88.3 per cent compared to an average of 55 per cent for Latam.

This country also edges most Latam countries with a fourth placing of 60.6 per cent mobile internet penetration compared to an average of 58 per cent for the region.

Between 2020 and 2030, the GSMA expects to see $700 billion added to global revenues because of 5G implementation, with specific jumps in services (improving by 40 per cent) and manufacturing (39 per cent.)

The star of the morning event was Devindra Ramnarine, ICT adviser to the Ministry of Digital Transformation.

Ramnarine spoke on behalf of the minister, Hassel Bacchus, and it's fair to say that he stole of the minister's thunder, offering the first clear-cut commitment to specific action from the Digital Transformation Ministry.

Responding to requests from Arima, the ministry will commit significant resources to building out a Connected Arima as a model, or as Ramnarine put it, a “use case” for how a community might be connected digitally across a range of applications.

These range from the eminently useful, as deploying IoT for local agriculture, to the aspirationally fanciful – what are smart sporting facilities, anyway?

"We want to use this to make the argument, to demonstrate how technology can be used," Ramnarine said.

Declaring the ministry "willing to fail fast," Ramnarine committed to working more extensively with established local developer resources and to create a framework to make better use of home-grown talent.

"We can only do this through partnerships," Ramnarine said.

"We are looking to partner with everyone, from small to large enterprises."

The Government sees growing the ICT sector as part of growing GDP and will also explore the establishment of government cloud services and begin making open data available, beginning with spatial data.

The short three-hour summit, which offered no perspectives from the technology private sector, could hardly be defined as either definitive or all-embracing.

TSTT CEO Lisa Agard boasted of the company's $8.6 billion investment in infrastructure, Dr Kim Mallalieu, senior lecturer, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UWI, spoke of the many research projects underway at the university, and Kurt Meyer, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Education, spoke, quite surprisingly, of the ministry's readiness with learning management software when covid19 hit.

But it wasn't clear how all these skeins will magically knit themselves into the digitally-oriented fabric needed to move TT to a computationally advantaged future.

The Education Ministry's cheerful evaluation of its performance is belied by its own figures. Out of a cohort of 225,000 students, just over half, 131,109, are registered in the system and only 50,509 are actually using it.

Worse yet, there is no simple sentence that sums up what all this activity is supposed to lead to.

The TT involvement in the oil and gas sector was driven by a simple imperative – to drill a mountain of money out of TT.

What is a DigitalTT supposed to deliver and why does nobody seem ready to make that clear?

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