Internet in Schools Initiative

Ivan Tesecum

With a new academic year set to begin later this month for secondary and primary schools, respectively, Belize Telemedia Limited has been working with the Ministry of Education.  This is in the event that plans to resume face-to-face instructions are aborted at the last minute due to an increase in active COVID-19 cases.  News Five spoke with Chief Executive Officer Ivan Tesucum.

Ivan Tesucum, Chief Executive Officer, B.T.L.

“Part of how we’ve assisted is that we have a fiber to the home network that covers over eighty percent of this country, almost two thousand miles of fiber to the home that connects those homes and over that period of time as well, we’ve gone from where we were having only eight [megabytes] to where now the smallest speed is as high as thirty megs.  The price has decreased almost by three hundred percent in terms of price on the speed, or the speed has increased by three hundred percent and the price has gone down almost by seventy-five percent.  And so, with the fiber to the home network we are able to provide the schools connections that they probably weren’t able to previously.  So for schools we have up to five hundred megs of which a hundred and thirty is given by B.T.L., by Digi and then the remainder is given by the Government of Belize.  And so, we partner with them.  We have over three hundred schools that have access to a hundred mega that allows the school to have connectivity in certain locations, whether it’s the principal’s office, the computer lab and so that is what allows them to get connected to the internet.  We know that technology is everything right now and we know that online learning is, that modality just doesn’t seem like it will go away anytime soon, so we are partnering to see what other things we can do with the Government of Belize as well.”