C&W trying to join fibre-optic consortium -... -
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Published on: 1/19/2005
Last Visited: 1/19/2005
Yesterday, Brian Crawford, the president of Trans Caribbean Cable Company (TCCC) confirmed in an interview with the Business Observer that C&W had been in talks since December to join the TCCC team.
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"The negotiations went well," said Crawford.
Yesterday C&W confirmed the negotiations, but would not elaborate.
However, Crawford suggested that C&W may have been motivated to secure another route out of Jamaica by Hurricane Ivan, and the potential the firm saw for major disruption to its service.
"Remember what happened after the hurricane," Crawford said alluding to the storm which disrupted C&W's fibre-optic network for over two days in September last year, leaving much of the island without Internet service.
Crawford himself could provide little information on Digicel's decision to break from the consortium, telling the Business Observer that he had "no information that Digicel is out".
But he acknowledged that Digicel's notable absent from last week's TCCC general meeting in Montego Bay, had raised some questions.
"Digicel was not represented at the meeting," he said."They said that they had another meeting which conflicted."
Crawford added that Digicel's apparent "departure would have very little impact on the deployment of the cable", since other investors - among them some of the US largest telecoms, were still a part of the group.
"MCI, Verizon, Cingular/AT&T each have three times more capacity than Digicel ever had, and so if Digicel were to leave it would only be unfortunate for Digicel," said Crawford.
Digicel's first option was to secure its own licence to build a cable out of Jamaica, but as a safety had joined the TCCC group.
However, another group called FibraLink, along with TCCC, were offered the two licences.
"Digicel seems to be unhappy because they did not get the ability to control access of offering capacity for sale," Crawford reasoned.