Trinidad’s Telecom Company TSTT launches 4G Wireless ahead of Digicel

Trinidad’s telecom company, Telecommunications Services of T&T (TSTT) took a major jump on its competition yesterday to lead the country into the next era of high speed wireless solutions, with the launch of its new 4G version of Blink on the Go in time for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

The service, which will be available initially in Port-of-Spain, will be available for CHOGM delegates, the media and various enterprise clients who will be using and testing the new service over the next two months.

Jeffery Chung, product manager, said the new technology has already been quite impressive at the CHOGM People’s Forum, where the entire system was deployed in just a few minutes, rather than a few days, or even weeks of planning needed for cabling and connectivity used by previous technologies.

“The end users at the forum have been quite impressed with the speed and clarity of the new system,” Chung said yesterday at TSTT’s media briefing on WiMax services, TSTT House, Edward Street, Port-of-Spain. Jay Alvi, executive vice-president, enterprise services, said TSTT had already invested more than $100 million since spectrum was awarded to deploy WiMAX technology in April based on the new 802.16e wireless standard. The new 4G—for 4th Generation—wireless technology is several times faster than the existing traditional 3G networks.

3G is currently used to power Blackberries, smart phones and other advanced mobile devices. “WiMAX technology is new to TSTT’s skill set, and over the past seven months, the company has worked closely with equipment suppliers to learn the new system and build out the first phase of T&T’s first broadband network based on 4G wireless technology,” Alvi said. He said WiMAX works like a combination of a mobile network and WiFi. It distributes wireless broadband access over a large geographic area from a centralised WiMAX tower. In TSTT’s case, it is actually using WiMAX equipment on its existing cellular towers.
source:guardian.co.tt