Tuesday in Nassau (Bahamas), at a luncheon of the private sector with President Michel Martelly, Leon Williams, the Director General of the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) has indicated that his company planned to enter the cellular market in Haiti stressing that "The Bahamas is 350,000 people. There will be a new player in the market come 2015, and a third player in the market come 2016. The pie is just so much, and all you are doing is dicing it up into smaller quarters [...] BTC has to extend outside the Bahamas and grow the market someplace else for top-line revenues or we are dead in the water. It’s not rocket science."

Mr. Williams declared that Haiti represented this opportunity, since BTC had extended an under-sea fibre optic cable to that country "In 2005 we negotiated building the fibre submarine cable into Haiti [...] We had made an offer to work with Teleco de Haiti and looked at the possibility of a GSM license, and and an ISP (Internet Service Provider) license and a cable license. We didn’t capitalise on it and there was a changing of administrations in 2007, and so nothing happened with Haiti [...] We still have the cable there, it’s working, it’s underutilised and certainly BTC would like to go back into Haiti and see what the possibilities are."

Adding "Since we didn’t take the opportunity, Digicel went in. Digicel has 3.5 million customers in Haiti compared to a Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC), which has 1.3 million in the entire Caribbean."

Some observers will argue that BTC has already missed the boat on Haiti, and that it would be better that they first focusing on preparing it to fight off cellular competition in the Bahamas. It is also unclear whether the entry into Haiti would be compatible with the plans of CWC.

SL/ HaitiLibre