 Guyana plans to spend US$30 million on supplying computers to poor families, aimed at making internet access widely available to Guyanese and stimulate demand for the Internet-based content.
Addressing the official launching of the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph's (GT&T) E-magine new high-speed submarine fibre-optic link from Trinidad, President Jagdeo said 90,000 poor households would each get one free computer over the next three years.
"This is huge for us; it's going to be a big investment but it would also generate the demand that GT&T and the others need to sell some of this bandwidth that you have so we would like to also partner with them in this project," said Jagdeo.
The President said the project was put on the back-burner pending the availability of high-speed internet. GT&T has spent US$30 million to lay a new high-speed submarine fibre-optic link from Trinidad, aimed at providing higher bandwidth and eliminating repeated disconnections of the Americas II cable.
Mr. Jagdeo also reiterated that when the government-funded submarine fibre-optic cable from Brazil lands here later this year, there would also be room for partnership with the phone company.
He projected that increased demand would see the investors recovering their capital and eventually making profit.
The Guyana government has already asked the phone company to provide details of its future plans to avoid redundancy with the state-funded submarine fibre-optic cable. That cable would be laid by a Chinese company from neighbouring Brazil.
Reacting to the Guyanese leader's call for GT&T to invest in Internet-based content as part of efforts to trigger demand and at the same time make the fibre optic cables profitable, Chief Executive Officer of GT&T's parent company, Atlantic Tele-Network (ATN), Michael Prior said his company intends to take up the challenge.
"We're going to have to take another leap-of-faith and make sure it's very affordable and that we lead people in and that we figure out products that are accessible to all," said Prior.
The Guyana government, Telesur and GT&T believe that the new fibre-optic cable would help create job, educational, service-provision and other opportunities. BrainStreet, an online teaching-learning facility, is already taking advantage of high-speed Internet to deliver distance education.
Mr Prior agreed that it would take time for broad-band to be accessible to the majority of Guyanese.
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Comments
Can we have further information on this time scale?
Could someone help me to understand this sort of double-talk?
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