Industry experts agree: Regulators must protect Caribbean mobile subscribers

Mobile telecommunications operators in the region will continue to take advantage of consumers until stronger regulatory frameworks are built to protect Caribbean citizens. Regulators across the region must take decisive action to protect consumer choice, and the neutrality of the Internet across the Caribbean.

This is the consensus emerging among several Latin America and Caribbean Internet and telecommunications industry experts who spoke to the T&T Guardian after a move by regional mobile operators Digicel and LIME to block Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services over their networks in Haiti, Jamaica and T&T.

Digicel’s decision to take action against the VoIP operators was first announced last month in Haiti, where their customer base of four million mobile broadband subscribers includes some 200,000 users of VoIP services such as Magic Jack, Google Talk, Viber, Tango and FaceTime. Digicel customers in Haiti were soon joined by their counterparts in Jamaica, where mobile competitor LIME also banned Viber.

In T&T, the move triggered backlash from concerned consumers, many of whom immediately took to social media to express their concern and displeasure. The Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago (TATT) later announced via press release that it had requested that Digicel reconsider its position, while a post on the telco’s Facebook page said it was “pleased to resume all VoIP-based products while TATT is engaged in investigating the negative impact of unlicensed providers and the adverse impact they have on infrastructure based investment in Trinidad and Tobago.”

But many industry watchers are describing the move by Digicel as unjustified and dangerous.

Dr Kim Mallalieu

“As far as I am aware, subscribers pay service providers for access to the Internet. As far as I am aware, service contracts do not specify what form the information transported must take. I do not see the justification for blocking VoIP,” said Kim Mallalieu, Senior Lecturer, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine.

“The implications are very straightforward: customers lose since they are prevented from using applications that for many of them justify having a [mobile broadband Internet] connection,” said telecom analyst Jose Otero, president of industry intelligence firm Signals Telecom Consulting.

“It’s also bad news for local developers who may see their applications blocked by mobile operators if they consider them to be competing with one of their services. However, at the end of the day it’s an issue that needs to be solved by each island’s local regulatory authorities.”

The T&T Guardian also contacted the Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre (LACNIC), one of five regional Internet registries which provide critical background services that support the global operation of the Internet.

“Measures like these degrade, discriminate, block and prejudice the rights of users in activities Internet based,” said Cesar Diaz, expert on regulatory frameworks at LACNIC.

The “Internet ecosystem”, Diaz explained, depends on regulators’ ability to defend a number of fundamental rights including users’ right to access legitimate content and applications of their choice, freedom of expression, and the right to privacy and confidentiality of communications.

“Regulators should enforce basic principles for the protection of consumers from arbitrary and unnecessary restrictions on the use of Internet. Users must have within their services agreements access to legitimate content of their choice. You must be able to run applications of their choice, and connect any device of your choice to access the Internet.”

Without impairing the rights of operators, industry regulations should promote the development of the Internet market, expand its access to more users and improve the quality of services, said Diaz, who worked for the Panamanian regulator ASEP before joining LACNIC.

Stronger consumer protection needed

“Latin American operators are not going to block mobile VoIP since they already lost that battle over ten years ago when they tried to block fixed VoIP,” Otero said.

He and Diaz are among several local and international observers who are saying that regulators such as TATT, Haiti’s National Telecommunications Council (CONATEL) and Jamaica’s Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) must now take swift, strong action to protect Caribbean consumers.

Bevil Wooding

“The action of these ISPs sets a dangerous precedent and could have a deleterious impact on efforts to leverage ICTs for both economic and social development across the region,” said Internet Strategist and Business Guardian columnist Bevil Wooding, in a strongly worded opinion piece on the emerging situation.

According to telecom industry analysts, the move by Digicel and LIME is motivated by falling revenues and voice traffic, as consumers increasingly look for ways to bypass costly calling rates, Jacquelines Charles writes in a Miami Herald report on the developing situation.

It is because mobile service providers impose such high international call termination rates and “artificially high” intra-regional roaming charges that Caribbean consumers are fighting to hold on to VoIP alternatives, Wooding pointed out.

“Why are roaming costs and international call rates so expensive? And who benefits the most from this? There are reasons why Internet-based voice services like Skype, Viber, Vonage and Magic Jack so popular. These services provide consumers and business across the region with an affordable option for communicating with friends, family and business partners.”

Shernon Osepa

Data, not minutes, is the new currency for telecom providers, said Wooding, adding that Caribbean telecom providers have not evolved to meet the realities of business in the Internet age. Shernon Osepa, a telecommunications industry analyst specialising in Internet Policy, agreed.

“Digicel is a mobile operator with voice services as one of its main services. You would notice that they don't mind if consumers are just "browsing" the Internet. That doesn't affect them. They have problems with applications such as Skype and Viber as these are a direct threat to their own voice services.”

“The regulator should promote sound competition which will lead to innovative services and affordable prices. It should also protect consumers from abusive behaviors. On the other hand, operators must also be able to adapt their business models constantly in order to be in harmony with technological developments.”

But, Osepa said, most regulators “don't really understand the Internet economy”, and they therefore need to quickly learn more about the new rules of engagement in order to do their jobs more effectively.

“This is the only way they can draft sound policies in this modern world.”

TATT’s policy on the procedures for the introduction of tariff changes, promotions, new services and bundles in the telecommunications sector remains a draft document.

“This is probably a case where the government should initiate a public dialogue to determine the appropriate public policy approach that encourages further investment by operators like Digicel while also creating opportunity for innovation and ensure the protection of consumer interests,” Osepa said.

Tracking T&T Energy Revenue: There's an app for that!

Do you want an easier way to track T&T’s oil and gas revenue? There’s an app for that! And following a workshop to promote open data hosted by the T&T Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (TTEITI), there may soon be more than one.

TTEITI is part of a global initiative that promotes accountability and transparency by companies and governments involved in extractive industries, such as gas, oil, quarrying and mining. Held in partnership with the international non-profit BrightPath Foundation, the event attracted a diverse audience of technologists, new media practitioners and business innovators interested in software development for social change.

The workshop is part of the TTEITI secretariat’s ongoing efforts to publicise the contents of its first report, titled Making Sense of T&T’s Energy Dollars, published last September. The report provides independently reconciled figures for company payments and government revenues and receipts for fiscal year 2010 to 2011. Through its partnership with BrightPath, TTEITI was the first to have a mobile app created as part of the release of the report data.

Open access Mark Regis, head of the TTEITI Secretariat, credited BrightPath with providing the “ecosystem” of human and technical capacity needed to extract the technical and financial data contained in the lengthy, written report and convert it to a machine-readable format that can be used by interested software developers to build useful applications.

“What TTEITI needed was a way to get their information out to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. And that’s exactly what the technology allows,” said BrightPath executive director, Bevil Wooding. “We recognised that this needed to be part of a much broader conversation about the need for greater openness in the publication of public data across all sectors, hence the idea to host the Open Data Workshop,” Wooding said.

“What we’ve done here for energy, can also be done for health, education, commerce, transport, works, national security and other areas where public data is not easily accessible to the public. This is technology being used for the greater good. That’s what we’re going after.”

Developers welcome The next step, Wooding said, is to encourage more young people, especially secondary school students with an interest in technology, to see themselves as having a valuable role to play in the open data movement for national development. Irwin Williams, a postgraduate Computer Studies student at The University of the West Indies (UWI) Department of Computing and Information Technology and a professional software developer at Teleios Systems, facilitated the hackathon segment of the workshop.

“This was the first time a government agency presented its data in an open format and invited developers to come out and write apps on it,” Williams said in a blog post Friday. “The app that resulted from the process allowed us to even think about the data differently...I’m glad we were able to be part of what I hope to be the first of many such initiatives.”

By the end of the codesprint, Williams had guided participants to complete one app focused on the differences between Government’s expected receipts and companies’ reported payments. Participants committed to completing several other apps, all of which aim to make it easier for the average citizen to track how the country manages its natural resource wealth. Among the coders was Nigel Henry, founder and lead analyst of Solution By Simulation.

“The workshop opened my eyes to the fact that software development is a necessary link between data collection and public data analysis. I realise now that people who call themselves data scientists can and should play a part in creating mobile and desktop apps that allow interested persons who are not professional data analysts to manipulate data in useful ways,” Henry said. Henry said he previously wrote code as “just a personal hobby” but he now sees it as “a professional responsibility to contribute to national development.”

Follow the money “The concept of open data is totally in step with the essential mandate and core vision of EITI,” said Regis. “Following the data is following the money.” Regis described the open data workshop as the next logical step in TTEITI’s ongoing central mission to make information about wealth distribution more easily and permanently accessible to the entire population.

“People aren’t generally interested in reading about revenue figures. So they may not read our 70-page report or even the 12-page summary, but using the TTEITI app they can still get answers to specific questions about the country’s wealth.” T&T was the first country to release a mobile app as part of the publication of the internationally accessible report. Copies of the report can be downloaded via app, in the Google Play store.

The workshop took place Thursday at Kapok Hotel, Port of Spain. Presenters included Gerard Best, Guardian new media editor, Keisha Thomas, a UK-based open data researcher, and Dr Patrick Hosein and Dr Kim Mallalieu, both of The UWI St Augustine. TTEITI plans to hold several similar events in 2014.