B.T.L. announces $50 million upgrade
If you own a computer you know that within a few months of your purchase they invariable come out with new, more advanced models that make your once powerful machine seem puny. That’s pretty much the same thing that happens to telecom companies—only on a much larger scale. Today, Belize’s principal communications provider essentially announced that it was time to buy a new computer … and as News Five’s Janelle Chanona reports, it’s a biggie.
Dean Boyce, Chairman, Telemedia Executive Committee
“The fast moving technologies mean that we cannot stand still, we must adapt and change as a company.”
Janelle Chanona, Reporting
This morning Belize Telemedia Limited held an official signing ceremony to mark the start of a multi-million dollar partnership with Nortel Networks to improve wireless and cellular communications.
Dean Boyce
“The first phase will be implemented by right about March next year. It will be an ongoing development. Not everybody is going to receive the service immediately. It will be, the first phase will deploy across some large parts of the country and then we’ll continue to work to plug all the gaps.”
According to Dean Boyce, Chairman of Telemedia’s Executive Committee, the Nortel contract is part of a fifty million dollar investment plan. The first phase of the upgrade will include the complete replacement of the company’s existing G.S.M. network and see the implementation of a new C.D.M.A. wireless system, as another option to cell phone users. The changes will also allow the company to offer voice communication and high speed internet to rural communities. Telemedia admits the improvements have become necessary because its current structure cannot support the growing technological needs of more than one hundred and twenty thousand cellular customers and thirty-three thousand land line users. But the expansion will mean a change in how we pay for telecom services.
Dean Boyce
“If you’re making a telephone conversation and you’re no longer having a telephone conversation over a piece of copperwire and all you see if the phone, if you then see the person at the other end, if you are downloading videos of friends and families, watching television shows over the internet, then that requires a completely different charge out mechanism to the one we’ve got at the moment. You cannot have, if we have a hundred million dollars a year of total costs to recover, in order to, before we make any sort of profit, then you have to recover those costs in some shape or form and at the moment, it will be per minute based. Seventy-five percent of our revenues is recovered on a per minute charge out basis. And that will not be the case in the future, it cannot be because you can’t separate voice calls so easily from all the other range of services that you are going to receive.”
Ray Bulengo, V.P., Carrier Sales, Caribbean Nortel
“We want to show a showcase a company that’s moving forward really quickly. The change of your image reflects that. It’s no longer ‘telecommunications’, it’s ‘telemedia’. And I think it’s the investment and decisions in the management direction that you’ve taken and the leadership you’ve shown in terms of where you’re going, it’s certainly a great honour for Nortel to be a part of that and we thank you for selecting us as your partners in this venture.”
And to its local and foreign competition, B.T.L. had this to say…
Dean Boyce
“I can’t say what their development plans are but we will certainly be pushing it out there and they’ve got to try and keep up with us.”
“What we’ve decided is that we will give Belize as a whole, every opportunity to have the best possible services you can get and we’ll do it properly and we’ll do it on a significant scale.”
Reporting for News Five, I am Janelle Chanona.
According to B.T.L., their latest multi-million dollar investment is the second in five years. In 2002, as Belize Telecommunications Limited, the company claims to have spent sixty million on the current G.S.M. network.
