To keep up with the speeds that people are requiring, LIME is investing, over this year and next, over $30 million locally to upgrade its system, according to LIME Cayman Islands CEO Bill McCabe in this weeks interview with CNS Business Video. The ability of Cayman to compete with the rest of the world, especially in the high-end industries that thrive here, is highly dependent on the ability to connect and communicate with the rest of the world, and that means that the demands for speed and really good infrastructure is tremendous, he said.Looking to the future, he said that they were very interested in Health City Cayman Islands’ plans for telemedical services, noting that telecommunications would be at the core of that for HCCI to be able to provide diagnostics and medical services.
In the last few months, he noted, the firm has added a tremendous amount of capacity and resilience on both the Maya-1 and the CBUS cables, its two main cables going off the island in order to secure in our off-island capacity.
The move to LTE, which is the latest version of mobile technology, was a very big investment which puts Cayman in the top 20% of mobile networks around the world. “We’ve got 100% population coverage on that and it’s a really important step to keep people connected on the move,” McCabe told CNS Business Video.
The third major investment involves moving from a copper-based industry, which has served the world very well for the last 100 years, to a fibre-based industry. This, said McCabe, “is a once in a multi-generation change to the infrastructure on the island.”
“Just in the last six months, the demands that have been made on our data networks has doubled, and that happens every six months,” he said. But their customers “don’t let up. They want it faster, they want greater bandwidth and greater connectivity, and that’s in the business world as well as the (individual) consumer.”
“After every christmas we see an uplift in the data demands because people are getting new ipads, tablets, phablets, smartphones, laptops, X-Boxes and smart TVs, and all of these require connectivity and increase the demand on the networks,” he said.
Cayman is in the top 10% of countries for people’s demands for devices like smartphones, so a very high proportion of customers are demanding connectivity all the time wherever they are, McCabe explained.
“But if you look at the rest of the world … there are over 2 billion customers connected via mobile devices but only 700 million connected via fixed line internet, so having connectivity on the move is incredibly important, not just here but around the world.”
Looking into the future of telecommunications involves “a bit of crystal ball gazing”, he said, “But if we look at where we’ve come from, just ten years ago there was no YouTube, for example, but right now there are over 100 hours of content uploaded every minute of the day.” So the evolution of telecommunications has created incredible demands on data networks by both individual consumers and the business community.
In terms of education, people are getting degrees online, so they are able to hold down jobs and get their education at the same time, and he also noted the government’s stated intention to develop e-government.
“Everyone’s heard of Google eye glasses,” he said, “but who knows what’s going to be around the corner.” the possibilities are for everything will be connected all the time, from fridges to TVs to cars to everyday appliances to traffic lights.
“There are some forecasts that by 2020 there will be somewhere between 50 and 75 billion connected devices around the world, which shows incredible growth and ever-increasing demands. The job of telecommunications is to ensure that we have the bandwidth and the connectivity available for these new industries to thrive and develop because it forms a foundation of those new industries,” McCabe said.
Source-CNS Business
