Columbus Group, a partner of the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph (GT&T) Company on the Guyana-Suriname fibre optic cable project, Thursday pledged some 20 gigabytes of bandwidth available for education purposes in Guyana over the next three years. A symbolic hand over was made by Columbus Representative, Mr. Paul Scott to Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of GT&T and CEO Designate, Mr. Yog Mahadeo after the commissioning of the cable at the Guyana International Conference Centre, Liliendaal.
In an invited comment, Mahadeo said 25 schools will also be targeted for subsidized bandwidth.
“We are presently supporting 20 schools so we will increase their bandwidth…we will upgrade them,” he said.
President Bharrat Jagdeo, in his address during the commissioning ceremony, said having affordable internet is important to the education sector.
The Head of State said this is an area where the region is, unfortunately, losing its competitive edge to the rest of the world.
He added that making the educational industry one of the new “export sectors” though ICT is an avenue that can be explored.
The President pointed out that he has been calling for a regional Information Communication Technology (ICT) plan which focuses on regional broadband access for all of the people.
“We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on roads, on water supply, sewerage…those are important but they don’t have the same kind of transformative impact on our society if we were to spend this on broadband access plus the instruments for all of our households. The educational industry could see a boom in our region and we can probably offset some of the loss of competitiveness in the traditional trade areas that we are accustomed to,” Jagdeo said.
The President’s contention is that telecommunication has the ability to transform almost every aspect of life, an increase in productivity and competitiveness in almost every area.
Jagdeo, Guyana has a duty to do it if it’s not going to be done at the regional level.
“I know we have resource constraints but … this is one area if the state has to even subsidize that access it will because we see it as very important,” he said.
According to GT&T the cable provides unlimited and inexpensive bandwidth that underpins a revolution in communication and the robust redundant superhighway on which modern services run.
The cable reportedly connects Guyana and Suriname with Trinidad and Tobago and ultimately, the rest of the world. The facility will make available 3,000 times the current bandwidth capacity in use locally, providing an improvement in the delivery of telecommunications and related services in Guyana while acting as redundancy for the Americas II cable.