GT&T attracted over 30,000 new subscribers this year, the company’s Director of Marketing Wystan Robertson said yesterday.
Robertson told reporters that the growth of the company’s subscriber base was no small feat, in the context of the current market size. He highlighted the company’s innovations over the last year, including the introduction of its IM2GO service, wireless modems, its free Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) service, as well as promotions such as Dollar Talk and its Jingle and Song competition. He said the services and promotions demonstrate the company’s commitment to giving value to subscribers.
He also reported an increase of revenue over the past three years.
Looking ahead to next year, Robertson said that the operationalisation of the new Suriname-Guyana Submarine Cable System (SG-SCS) would see a marked transformation of GT&T as a provider, particularly in the realm of enhancing and enabling the local internet landscape. The SG-SCS is to be commissioned in the second quarter of next year and Robertson revealed that “laying the cable from the Guyana end” would begin offshore in the next two weeks. Last year, GT&T and Telecommuni-catiebedrijf Suriname inked a US$60 million construction and maintenance agreement for the SG-SCS and a supply pact with contractor Global Marine Systems Ltd. With the new system, the two companies have promised reliable voice and data telecom services, including increased bandwidth. Robertson emphasised that the cable would transform the country’s internet landscape, noting that the available bandwidth would create opportunities to be exploited. The cable is expected to provide a more secure redundancy to the current links and eliminate the possibility of international communications outage to residential and business users.
The SG-SCS will see the two countries linked through a state-of-the-art 1,200 kilometre (700 mile) submarine fibre optic cable connected to a worldwide network of similar cables through a landing station in Trinidad. The cable will be routed from Chaguaramas, Trinidad to a branching unit in the Atlantic from where it will be diverted to Georgetown in Guyana and Paramaribo in Suriname.
The integrated cable system will have the potential capacity of increasing the telecommunications bandwidth by 3,000 to 4,000 times more than what is currently available through the Americas 11 cable and satellite links.
Currently, the capacity of the Americas 11 cable has almost been fully exploited, although it is due to be upgraded in 2010. There have been major disruptions in telecoms traffic here as a result of damage to the Americas 11 cable and the companies promise greater security and reliability with the new system.
