SHOULD all go well, residents of the West Bank Demerara villages of Nismes, Bagotville (on the public road), La Grange, La Retraite and Toevlugt are on stream to receive the services of GT&T’s fibre-optic cable in their homes.

The telecommunications giant who has brought Internet service to these shores has allowed the Guyanese people to connect with the rest of the world like never before; and this connectivity is expected to improve in time as GT&T continues to invest in new information and communications technologies, and network expansion and modernization.
Innovations over the Internet are accelerating; and today, in large part because of the investments GT&T has made to allow Guyanese consumers access to high-speed Internet service, a growing number of our people are in a position to do what their relatives and friends abroad are doing — following their favourite television, news and sports programmes, and in some instances even movies, over the Internet.
For these reasons, the GT&T plan for the future to deploy a Gigabyte Passive Optical Network (GPON), which is the evolving technology with the capacity to provide superfast and secure voice and data services over fibre-optic cabling.
GT&T intends to roll out fibre to the consumers’ homes and places of business, generally referred to as the provision of “fibre to the home” (FTTH), and to deploy a GPON as the basis of a truly fibre–centric transport network.
“Our plan is to deploy the GPON and fibre network across all major population centres over the next few years. This means that, by the commissioning of the GPON network by middle of 2013, in excess of 2000 residents stand to see their lives totally transformed insofar as there will be no meaningful limitations to the data speed GT&T can push to these communities.
“Equally important to us is the fact that the GPON service will be completely priced and affordable.
“In 1996, we pioneered the deployment of fixed wireless access (FWA) service; and then, in 2007, we deployed the wireless local loop (WLL) service, to bring telecommunications access to a number of communities on the West Bank of Demerara, the East Bank of Demerara, and the Essequibo coast and islands.
“Regrettably, notwithstanding our best efforts, these communities which we have served with the FWA and WLL technologies have experienced numerous service disruptions, in part because the manufacturer ceased production and support for the FWA system, and in part because both FWA and WLL systems are dependent on a battery backup facility which eventually collapsed in the face of the erratic and unstable utility-supplied AC power.
“We are convinced that, moving into the future, GT&T will rely increasingly on GPON to provide high-speed data services. Thus, after successful commissioning of the West Bank Demerara pilot project, our customers and the country as a whole can look forward to GT&T moving apace to deploy “fibre to the home” (FTTH) and GPON in other parts of the country, especially in the more heavily populated business districts,” said a release from the Guyana Telephone & Telegraph Company Limited (GT&T).