Sean Nero

Irish mo­bile net­work Dig­i­cel got the jump on lo­cal tele­com gi­ant bmo­bile with the for­mal in­tro­duc­tion of the 4G net­work sys­tem in T&T, but that does not mean the Irish-owned com­pa­ny can of­fer cus­tomers faster speeds, says Lisa Agard, ex­ec­u­tive vice-pres­i­dent, bmo­bile ser­vices and com­pa­ny re­tail dis­tri­b­u­tion. While Dig­i­cel cus­tomers were al­ready fa­mil­iaris­ing them­selves with the po­ten­tial won­ders of the 4G net­work, bmo­bile sub­cribers will have to wait un­til Sep­tem­ber be­fore the ma­jor­i­ty state-owned com­pa­ny's com­pa­ra­ble sys­tem is ful­ly im­ple­ment­ed and launched. She said the roll-out of bmo­bile's free Wi-Fi B-Zones across the coun­try of­fered its mo­bile cus­tomers down­loads at speeds that were even "faster than 4G. "4G did not land here last Fri­day. Our 4G WiMax net­work has been here for two years," said Agard.

Bmo­bile cus­tomers were al­ready en­joy­ing the rev­o­lu­tion­ary B-Zone Wi-Fi fa­cil­i­ty along the new board­walk in Ch­aguara­mas, at Mara­cas Bay and now Ari­api­ta Av­enue with more strate­gic lo­ca­tions to be added. She out­lined the com­pa­ny's abil­i­ty to stave off com­pe­ti­tion at the launch of the Stu­dio 5.3 mo­bile hand­set de­vel­oped by Blu Prod­ucts on Wednes­day at Club 51 De­grees. Blu Prod­ucts is a di­vi­sion of Unit­ed States-based tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, CT Mi­a­mi. De­spite T&T's re­port­ed po­si­tion as a world leader in mo­bile phone pen­e­tra­tion, Agard lament­ed that the lo­cal pop­u­la­tion was un­der-util­is­ing avail­able ac­cess. She quot­ed a De­cem­ber 2011 Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T quar­ter­ly re­port in­dus­try re­port, which stat­ed the mo­bile mar­ket had 1.8 mil­lion sub­scribers, but less than 10,000 of them used the mo­bile In­ter­net ser­vices.

She said the com­pa­ny was rolling out its ar­se­nal of prod­ucts, but not us­ing the one-size-fits-all mod­el, which was its rea­son for part­ner­ing with Blu Prod­ucts and its new gen­er­a­tion of smart­phones. This was tak­ing place si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly with its ef­forts to ed­u­cate the con­sumer. "The ex­plo­sion in de­mand for smart­phones and tablets has ex­clud­ed a sig­nif­i­cant part of the mar­ket from reap­ing ben­e­fits of that tech­nol­o­gy and, as I have men­tioned, bmo­bile does not see ac­cess as a lux­u­ry. "This Stu­dio 5.3 de­vice al­lows us to reach a new mar­ket that can gain ac­cess to the ex­cit­ing con­tent of app stores and ex­plore the fea­tures of this mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions de­vice, in ef­fect, mak­ing them part of and ac­tive par­tic­i­pants in the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion."