Editorial |Yes to broadband initiative, but ...

Beyond its ruinous impact on the island’s economy and the damage it has done to people’s physical and psychological health, the COVID-19 pandemic is leaving three other significant marks on Jamaica. It laid bare the country’s digital divide, underlined how much the island is underserved by high-speed Internet, and is concentrating minds on the potential of broadband technologies to transform the economy.

So, last week, Daryl Vaz, the science and technology minister, unveiled in Parliament a four-year initiative, at a cost of US$237 million (J$35.5 billion), to build out broadband capacity across Jamaica. Or, as he framed it, provide “access to the last mile”. There is no contradicting the logic of this idea.

Indeed, Minister Vaz reported that only 11.65 per cent of Jamaicans have access to fixed broadband service, while penetration by mobile telephones is just shy of 60 per cent. “The distribution is even more troubling, with the penetration highly skewed to urban centres, while the vast majority of the rural population remains unserved and underserved.”

Urban-rural Divide

This urban-rural divide in high-speed Internet has advertised itself very starkly in the island’s attempt to deliver education, in the midst of the pandemic, with the suspension of classroom teaching. Lessons have gone online. Except that even by the best estimates, up to half of the students, on a given day, are absent from these sessions. The greater bulk of the absenteeism is in rural communities, where Internet penetration is low. The digital divide is also manifested in a different way – along economic lines. In many poor urban communities, students regularly stay away from their online classrooms because their parents cannot afford to pay for fixed Internet/broadband service in their homes. Neither can most afford to regularly subscribe to data plans for their mobile phones.

These, clearly, are issues to be addressed. That, among other things, means that Jamaica must have an economy that achieves healthy and sustained growth, while delivering quality jobs from which citizens can afford services like high-speed Internet. Broadband, in this regard, is expected to be transcendental.

Minister Vaz quoted an Inter-American Development Bank study which showed that Caribbean countries add 3.2 per cent to their per capita GDP and 2.6 per cent to labour productivity for every 10 per cent increase in broadband penetration.

While this newspaper fully endorses the broad framework of this initiative, the proposal is in need of further and better particulars, and must proceed with absolute transparency before it can receive clear imprimatur.

Based on sketches so far, a special-purpose vehicle (SPV), with public- and private-sector partners, will spearhead this buildout. However, specifics such as the ratio of that partnership and whether the SPV will itself operate the network and lease wholesale services to independent operators are yet to be publicly addressed. Or, put another way, is the SPV to be a monopoly service provider? In which event, questions will arise about how it is to be regulated.

Notably, too, Vaz announced that the Government is investing in “high-speed fibre-optic communication backbone” for the Public Broadcasting Corporation of Jamaica (PBCJ), for it to connect with the rural cable television networks. At the same time, the PBCJ is being provided with “the capacity to broadcast digitally over the air using digital transmission technology”.

This, on the face of it, will fundamentally change the nature of the PBCJ (it currently transmits via independent cable networks, as a condition of their licences) with implications for the long-term economics of the corporation, as well as for the special law that governs its operation.

Transparency needed

Further, given the complexity of the issues at hand and the competitive nature of Jamaica’s media market in a hostile economy, Minister Vaz must ensure that this initiative is judiciously managed with transparency, and without the possibility for complaints about conflicts of interest. He must quickly bring all stakeholders to the table so that he may have the benefit of voices and opinions other than the bureaucrats and his closest advisers, who are mapping the scope of the proposal.