Gallery Discussions: Caribbean Telecommunications Technology

My friends from Martinique, here visiting me for the holidays, are taking advantage of many things related to telecommunications. Olivier Moreau, on right, is sending a SMS message to a friend within the Caribbean - just to let them know that they had arrived at my place safely.

That's just one example. But, since we met at the first Cardicis in St. Lucia, we've become fairly close friends as well as people interested in ICT in the Caribbean - and also ICT connecting people in the Caribbean to the larger world. After all, the Caribbean isn't a place that only exists in tourism brochures.¹ People live here, work here (other than serving umbrella drinks), and attempt to move forward in a global economy no matter what the governments and CARICOM do or say (or not do or say). We're connected. We know.

After taking that picture, and being sort of disappointed that they hadn't brought a laptop so that they could use my wireless access while they were here, I brought it up to Diane (the better half of Olivier) and mentioned that I have this little hotspot, but nobody stops by to use it. Why? Most people I know don't own laptops - something I didn't realize until I started the hotspot. Why? There's the cost. There's the availability of service for the laptop, and most noticeably the parts. I figure in time this will change, since Trinidad and Tobago is the richest country in the Caribbean - though where the money is going is certainly a good question. You can ask the gentleman on the left, who is looking for some.

Meanwhile, Venezualans who come to San Fernando to learn English go up on San Fernando Hill so that they can make calls locally on the Venezualan networks. This is an excellent lead in to talk about the issues of TSTT and the grip that they have on telecommunications, but since I write about that all the time I will not write about that here. You get it enough (and so do we).

Instead I'll talk about how globalization is allowing us to continue communicating despite governmental and CARICOM inertia. Instant messenging, Skype, GoogleTalk - all of these things bypass incidental costs. Do the grassroots really need the disembodied NGOs? What are they doing? They aren't keeping pace, are they?

During the Holiday season, I wonder how many people are using long distance calls still. Without VoIP, how much money left the region? More importantly, how many people could have saved money by using VoIP? Increasingly, the people of the Caribbean community are beginning to realize these issues not as technological, but as financial: If you can keep in touch with distant relatives and can afford more groceries while doing that, then there is something unstoppable that will happen.

Maybe it will be more cost effective for NGOs to stop trying to assist policy when it comes to these things. Maybe the best thing is to just sit back and wait for the tipping point to be reached, and when it is - no politician, no government and no NGO will be able to hamper progress further than they have already. After a year of dealing with NGO emails in my mailbox and watching the 'organization' occur while funding is looked for...

Maybe it's another rendition of the cycle of water.

¹ Something that the advertising on this site does not always reflect, but something which the Google Ad filter is helping me prune since I don't talk about the Caribbean in a tourist way almost 100% of the time. That's a weakness of contextual advertising. And Trinidad as a place for tourism is somewhat amusing to me anyway...