E-governance cable now promised by September

Project Coordinator of Guyana’s $3.1 billion e-governance project, Alexei Ramotar says that while supervision deficiencies have caused delays in the completion of the fibre optic cable-laying works, government has applied penalties and taken over the work to see it to the end by September, more than two years later than the first mooted completion date.

And he dismissed concerns of cyber espionage that the United States, Canada and Australia expressed on the use of Huawei – the Chinese IT giant whose technology is being used for the project.

Providing an update on the project, Ramotar told Stabroek News on Wednesday that while delays did affect the final budget of the project, they were able to recover funds from errant contractors by applying penalties. He would not comment on the cost overruns as a result of the delays. When this newspaper put the concerns of contractor Sam Barakat of Engineering and Construction Inc to Ramotar, he declined to comment. Barakat in a letter to this newspaper on February 20 had expressed displeasure at Ramotar who he alleged made statements casting blame for the delay of the project on Guyanese labour. Barakat said Ramotar should be the one on whom the responsibility falls for the failure of the supervisory works.

Ramotar however explain-ed why the delays occurred and what the project coordination office is doing to address them.
“When we started we were saying that it would have taken about six months [to complete] but it took almost six months to get started because of the nature of the job and the requirements for specialised equipment. After that, it took some time because it was a learning curve for us,” he said.

Alexei Ramotar (GINA photo)
Alexei Ramotar (GINA photo)

“The cable is laid…the entire length of the cable is laid from Lethem to Georgetown. However there were several areas where the cable was not laid to the specifications required and that has resulted in vehicular and bulldozer traffic breaking the cable. So right now what we are in the process of doing is fixing those issues,” he said. “We also have to do some other work mostly with supervision, to see how the overall work was done by the contractors and then we will be completed,” he said. He said that following the completion there will be an extensive testing phase lasting three to four months.

“We are also working on the solar sites since the equipment has to get power every hundred of so kilometres since the signal tends to slow down. You would have to boost the signal and shoot it out back. We are doing two things: we are adding more signal to be able to get connected to [more places such as] Linden, Kurupukari, Annai and Lethem and also to boost signal and push it forward,” he said.

He said that the aim of the project is to lower the cost of doing business in Guyana. He noted that one of the major problems ICT companies have is frequencies since it is very expensive. By using fibre optic and microwave the government aims to lower costs to encourage companies to come on board.
“What we are envisioning is lowering the costs for government as well,” he said, noting that the project will eventually see the advent of cloud computing and other technologies.

“We want to see how the signal works, to see if it can do videos and data transmission, which require high quality signals. We also have to see how the cable responds to [environmental exposure],” he said. He explained that there would be the need to do brush cutting in some areas to prevent trees and shrubbery from becoming entangled with the cables.

He said the testing has already been started and will continue for the next three months or so.
“When we started the project we did give the contractors the sort of equipment that they would require. We brought in a specialist to train the different teams,” he said. “Our major problem was the quality of supervision,” he said, noting that an external company had been carrying out the supervision and this has been terminated, resulting in those supervision duties being done by the Ministry of Works under Engineer Walter Willis.

Ramotar explained that the fibre optic project is part of a larger one aimed at developing the ICT structure in Guyana.
He said that before this project was conceptualised, every IT company wanting to operate in Guyana had to invest in its own infrastructure, a very expensive proposition. He said the project will bring to Guyana huge amounts of bandwidth using modern fibre optics. “It will allow a lot of information to flow,” he said. “It will [make it] more attractive for inves-tors coming to Guyana,” he said.

He said Guyana is way behind in terms of internet technology and this country should be at least on par with Suriname.

Asked about concerns expressed by Canada, the United States and Australia about potential security risks from Huawei, Ramotar said these fears strike him as more protectionist than anything else. “Huawei is the biggest telecoms provider in the world. If there is anybody who should be sceptical it would be the Russians because they are the next door neighbours to China and Huawei is a huge provider of telecoms in Russia,” he said. “I can’t say what the American issue is and the Australian issue seems to be protectionism,” he said.