Dig­i­cel’s chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Jab­bor Kayu­mov does not be­lieve he needs to use flow­ery lan­guage to con­vince you that his com­pa­ny pro­vides the best mo­bile ser­vice in this coun­try

In­stead, he wants you to do your own com­par­i­son.

So take out your mo­bile phone, down­load the Speedtest by Ook­la, and check for your­self.

“When you do the Speedtest you will see that Dig­i­cel is far bet­ter. The App is ab­solute­ly in­de­pen­dent. When you com­pare cov­er­age and speed, the App will trans­par­ent­ly tell you which net­work is faster and which net­work is big­ger. For­get the noise, do the test,” Kayu­mov said.

“A good prod­uct does not need mar­ket­ing,” Kayu­mov said as he stood be­side two Speedtest awards Dig­i­cel re­ceived in 2018 and 2019 for the Fastest Mo­bile Net­work in T&T.

“It’s not that we don’t have mon­ey for mar­ket­ing, we have the best prod­uct. Peo­ple talk­ing about Dig­i­cel is more than enough mar­ket­ing, word of mouth is more than enough for us,” he said.

Kayu­mov be­lieves his clos­est mo­bile com­peti­tor utilised cre­ative mar­ket­ing to pro­mote its re­cent launch of 5G in T&T.

Last week, TSTT in part­ner­ship with Huawei an­nounced that the fifth gen­er­a­tion of fixed wire­less tech­nol­o­gy had ar­rived.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it’s not avail­able on mo­bile de­vices as yet. It is on­ly avail­able at homes and busi­ness places for the time be­ing.

Kayu­mov said it was an ex­cit­ing mo­ment for the in­dus­try in T&T to hear that one of the op­er­a­tors was on its way to launch 5G.

How­ev­er, Kayu­mov said he was even­tu­al­ly left dis­ap­point­ed.

Kayu­mov said the re­cent­ly launched 5G is twice as slow as the cur­rent ca­pa­bil­i­ties be­ing of­fered by Dig­i­cel.

“With the cur­rent fi­bre prod­ucts Dig­i­cel is giv­ing up to 2GB (gi­ga­bytes) per sec­ond speed and what was again pre­sent­ed to us last week based on the in­for­ma­tion we got was 1GB per sec­ond,” he said.

“So, to me, it was a bit of con­fu­sion and dis­ap­point­ment. It looks like fixed 5G which is twice slow­er than the cur­rent prod­uct which we are of­fer­ing the mar­ket. To me it sound­ed more like mar­ket­ing than the prac­ti­cal so­lu­tion ad­dress­ing cus­tomer needs,” he said.

Kayu­mov said Dig­i­cel’s cus­tomers can get as much as 10GB per sec­ond if need­ed.

“If among our cor­po­rate cus­tomers or con­sumer seg­ments some­body wished to get 10GB per sec­ond I can give it to them, fi­bre can ac­cel­er­ate the speed based on the cus­tomer’s needs I just need to put end to end prop­er equip­ment to ac­cel­er­ate the speed,” he said.

“But def­i­nite­ly the cost will be dif­fer­ent be­cause you are ask­ing for the big­ger pipe for the fastest speed which means that my net­work cur­rent­ly can do 10 times faster than fixed 5G,” he said.

“So the 5G fixed launch last week is kind of a bit of a dis­ap­point­ment for me not from a com­peti­tor per­spec­tive but from a cus­tomer per­spec­tive,” Kayu­mov said.

He added that Dig­i­cel will launch 5G when the time is right.

“Def­i­nite­ly we are go­ing to launch 5G but it is go­ing to be mo­bile and it is go­ing to be a prop­er one to ad­dress cus­tomer needs. There are few con­di­tions we are go­ing to have be­fore that hap­pens.

“Def­i­nite­ly one of those is hav­ing the right spec­trum, and I think TATT (the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T) who is reg­u­lat­ing this in­dus­try is ac­tu­al­ly do­ing a great job. We are get­ting ra­tio­nal, very ob­jec­tive, very pro­fes­sion­al sup­port and guid­ance from the reg­u­la­tor so no com­plaints there,” he said.

Af­ford­abil­i­ty will be the next con­di­tion that need to be met, he said.

The third is the de­mand for 5G, he said.

“A few weeks ago when we launched ad­vanced LTE and I made that state­ment that T&T is not ready for 5G yet it was not about tech­nol­o­gy.

“Tech­nol­o­gy wise have the widest net­work or biggest net­work in Trinidad, we can launch 5G, prop­er mo­bile 5G, now I have to spec­i­fy that to avoid any mis­un­der­stand­ing, not the fixed one be­cause we are not go­ing to launch a fixed one for sure but prop­er mo­bile 5G we can do it re­al­ly, re­al­ly soon in a mat­ter of months if not weeks,” he said.

Kayu­mov said 5G is not a toy.

“5G has a pur­pose, it is not just a toy. 5G tech­nol­o­gy was de­vel­oped to ad­dress the fu­ture which will be built on ma­chine to ma­chine IOT world where every sin­gle de­vice you would have around you maybe even your so­fa will be con­nect­ed to the in­ter­net, will be talk­ing to each oth­er,” he said.

“When every­thing around us is con­nect­ed then you will have a high de­mand for con­stant con­nec­tion through air, mo­bile and wire­less to some da­ta cen­tre which will be pro­cess­ing so then you will have the de­mand from hun­dreds of thou­sands ma­chines re­quir­ing to con­nect per square kilo­me­tre which is cur­rent­ly not even close and this is what I mean by the mar­ket be­ing ready, this is what I mean by de­mand,” he said.

Kayu­mov said Dig­i­cel is cur­rent­ly meet­ing the de­mands of its cus­tomers.

“I have my net­work which is ad­dress­ing the cur­rent needs of my cus­tomer base con­sumer and cor­po­rate not many op­er­a­tors in Trinidad can of­fer that speed and that’s why for us our strat­e­gy is based on cus­tomer needs,” he said.

“We are not claim­ing that we are per­fect by all means. We still have a lot of ar­eas we have to im­prove, it is a work in progress but con­tin­u­ous im­prove­ment.”

Kayu­mov said Dig­i­cel has a “cus­tomer ob­ses­sion cul­ture.”

As a re­sult Kayu­mov has in­vit­ed peo­ple to fol­low him on In­sta­gram at dig­icelttceo where they can air their con­cerns.

Apart from their ex­ter­nal cus­tomers, Kayu­mov said Dig­i­cel al­so wants to serve its in­ter­nal cus­tomers.

“We have the hap­pi­est em­ploy­ees in the coun­try. If we are not there yet, if some of my staff mem­bers are not see­ing that we are ful­ly com­mit­ted to make it hap­pen,” he said.

Kayu­mov said this has al­so been re­flect­ed in the com­pa­ny’s bal­ance sheet.

“I think we are do­ing great. This year is go­ing to be the best year from a rev­enue per­spec­tive and prof­itabil­i­ty per­spec­tive that Dig­i­cel has ever had in T&T.

So it is not on­ly about the soft things but we can al­so see the num­bers and the num­bers are ac­tu­al­ly sup­port­ing the en­tire sto­ry.”

Kayu­mov said Dig­i­cel sees all chal­lenges as an op­por­tu­ni­ty.

One of the re­cent is­sues Dig­i­cel is try­ing to deal with is the cur­rent de­mon­eti­sa­tion of the $100 bill.

“For us we have to ad­just our op­er­a­tions with­in the next two weeks be­cause we are deal­ing with a lot of cash from the com­mu­ni­ty and we are talk­ing about a large amount of cash go­ing through­out the cor­po­ra­tion that is a chal­lenge,” Kayu­mov said.

“They are still valid un­til the end of the year so we are still op­er­at­ing busi­ness as usu­al but we are def­i­nite­ly com­ing up with a plan, our op­er­a­tional plan which is go­ing to ad­dress this sit­u­a­tion in ac­cor­dance with the lo­cal reg­u­la­tions and de­ci­sions which the gov­ern­ment is tak­ing around this top­ic.”