GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Re­porter

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

Chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of ma­jor­i­ty state-owned Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vice of T&T (TSTT), Lisa Agard, dis­closed yes­ter­day that re­gion­al telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion providers are plan­ning to hold ne­go­ti­a­tions with glob­al tech heavy­weights such as Ap­ple, Google, Ama­zon, Net­flix and Meta to help the Caribbean op­er­a­tors to off­set the cost of pro­vid­ing broad­band da­ta.

She said the en­ti­ty is lob­by­ing these en­ti­ties through the Caribbean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union (CTU) and hope­ful­ly Cari­com to bring this to fruition

Agard made the com­ments while de­liv­er­ing the open­ing re­marks at a work­shop for me­dia prac­ti­tion­ers ti­tled, “Cov­er­ing tech­nol­o­gy and the chang­ing land­scape,” host­ed by bmo­bile and Trinidad & To­ba­go Pub­lish­ers and Broad­cast­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTP­BA) on Tues­day.

Agard said TSTT re­cent­ly hired a Span­ish firm to ex­am­ine how much of its net­work re­sources are be­ing used by the glob­al tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies.

“And by big tech I’m talk­ing about the Meta, the Tik­Toks, the Net­flix and all of them....they use 67 per cent of our net­work as­sets. Six of the big tech op­er­a­tors utilise col­lec­tive­ly 67 per cent of our net­work as­sets and they make ze­ro con­tri­bu­tion to the de­vel­op­ment of those as­sets, yet we are be­ing asked to con­tin­u­ous­ly in­vest” she ex­plained.

She said in the Caribbean TSTT in­vests about US$500 mil­lion an­nu­al­ly.

Across the Caribbean, Agard added, there’s “no busi­ness case for 5G” if there are no re­turns.

“There’s no point. We are go­ing to launch, prob­a­bly in a cou­ple months where we are go­ing to do one 5G site at Pheonix Park, but it’s a fixed wire­less 5G site...for­get ubiq­ui­tous 5G de­ploy­ment, there’s just no mon­ey for it.

“Part of what we are ad­vo­cat­ing with pol­i­cy­mak­ers across the re­gion is ‘do you want the Caribbean to be part of that in­fra­struc­ture growth for the next ten years or do you want it to be a lost decade,” Agard added.

Mean­while, she al­so not­ed as the world changes so too has TSTT’s busi­ness mod­el.

Agard said this in­clud­ed align­ing cost with rev­enue de­clines, not­ing that the com­pa­ny made very sig­nif­i­cant changes over the past two and a half years, in­clud­ing cut­ting back on staff cost and “scrub­bing every­thing” deeply in the or­gan­i­sa­tion.

She said the chal­lenge posed by in­creased de­mand for band­width was just one of sev­er­al faced by TSTT in the last 18 months.

TSTT al­so un­der­went a mas­sive re­struc­tur­ing ex­er­cise last Ju­ly, which was in­flu­enced by mas­sive dips in rev­enue which prompt­ed a change in the com­pa­ny’s busi­ness mod­el and ma­jor ad­just­ments to its op­er­at­ing ex­pens­es.

TSTT re­trenched 468 of its work­ers last year as part of a ma­jor re­struc­tur­ing plan. In 2018, some 700 work­ers were re­trenched as TSTT com­plained of a $478 mil­lion fi­nan­cial loss and “high em­ploy­ee costs.”

Agard re­vealed non-staff ad­just­ments saw the com­pa­ny re­move about $160 mil­lion in op­er­at­ing costs while the re­struc­tur­ing has had a sig­nif­i­cant im­pact in terms of op­er­a­tional costs by about $12 mil­lion dol­lars a month and it will in­crease slight­ly over time.

Re­fer­ring again to the cost of broad­band, Agard said these moves could on­ly work out in the long run if the com­pa­ny is able to find vi­able rev­enue streams.

To piv­ot in­to new ar­eas TSTT con­tin­ues to ex­plore new ar­eas like fin­tech, Agard added.