Expanding despite pandemic issues
FLOW HAS had its footprints in the development of the local telecoms sector for more than 150 years. Digicel, its main competitor, has been in the market for two decades and boasts the lion’s share of the mobile market with just over two million customers. FLOW serves just over a million, having clawed back 50 per cent of the customers it lost at the onset of the pandemic, Price said.
The company has significantly ramped up its network expansion programme in response to the demand brought by the pandemic, and the need for more spectrum is also a concern, Price told The Sunday Gleaner.
“Our fixed network currently passes approximately 640,000 households across the country – which means that they have access to fixed voice, Internet and, in most instances, cable TV services,” Price said. “If we didn’t invest, we could have toppled our own network. We had to bring forward a number of investments that we had planned and speed up those investments to between April and August [last year].”
FLOW also built some 100 new cell sites last year to expand LTE mobile coverage to 96.4 per cent of the population.
“Plus, we added 70,000 homes and 5,000 businesses, which was really a powerful move from our perspective,” Price said.
INCREASED LOAD ON NETWORK
Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has added increased load to the company’s network, with schools moving online and many companies putting in place work-from-home arrangements.
“The immediate impact was a 57 per cent increase in network traffic, which was unbelievable. In addition to that network traffic, what also happened was that everybody moved into more video content, for example, entertainment consumption with Netflix, and meetings and school with Zoom, Google Meets and WhatsApp video, and these hog a lot more data,” Price said of the demand.
“There are complaints in the space that there is insufficient broadband connectivity or coverage for homes, and that we can admit,” Price said, noting that the issue was not unique to Jamaica.
“Nobody expected that the entire commerce of the world could move from a structured set of offices to homes. What people don’t necessarily understand is that corporate customers have structured packages dedicated to Internet access, which gives them the capacity they need to run their businesses. But when you switch to working from home, we move all of that traffic to a residential-shared network and it’s not designed for that,” the country manager explained.
Globally, content providers such as Netflix and YouTube have adjusted their video output to further ease the demand on networks.
“COVID-19 has doubled the demand for data and we’ve continued to respond in terms of that. [But] what it showed us is that we had a network that was taking on [the type] of growth that we weren’t forecasting to meet until later this year, happening in two to three weeks. So, we had to expand our off-island capacity into the country by 20GB and we have been expanding [our capacity] every quarter since,” he said.