Former mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young on Monday praised Oceanic Digital for having taken advantage of a 10 year-old US law, when it borrowed US$30 million from the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) to help fund its telecommunications infrastructure in Jamaica.

Oceanic, whose Miphone brand of cellular service was introduced in Jamaica less than two years ago, is the only company to have secured funding under the bill passed by the US Congress in 1994.

"MiPhone is the first private sector loan made to Jamaica on a bill passed in the Congress of the United States in 1994," noted Young, who, as the mayor of Atlanta in the 1980s, was a regular visitor to Jamaica. "That's too long to wait for the private sector to utilise some of the resources. We should have been doing this all along," he told guests at Oceanic's launch in western Jamaica, at a function held at the Wyndham Rose Hall Hotel.

Both Oceanic and Digicel Jamaica in 1999 paid the government around US$45 million each for the licence to provide cellular service in Jamaica. Oceanic was delayed in building out its infrastructure, and began by providing service to the Corporate Area. It now has over 70,000 customers and expects a rapid increase once it has achieved all-island coverage.

On Monday the chief executive officer of Oceanic Digital, Craig McBurnett, told the Business Observer that the type of technology being used by his company would make islandwide coverage easier. McBurnett said the US$30 million borrowed from the IDB was in addition to US$120 million that was spent during the initial stages of the infrastructure work.

Oceanic uses what is called a code division multiplex (CDMA) technology that McBurnett says avoids network blockages and "annoying drop calls" because CDMA does not need to use "nearly as many towers as the other two carriers" - a mere quarter of the number of towers used by say, Digicel, for the same area of coverage.

"That is extremely important for the environment and extremely important in a paradise as beautiful as Montego Bay," he remarked.

At the function, minister of commerce, science and technology, Phillip Paulwell said that Oceanic represented part of the overall dynamism of the information technology industry.

"Oceanic Digital is representative of the tremendous growth that has been taking place in the Jamaican ICT sector in recent years and it is against this background that we welcome the launch of MiPhone in the city of Montego Bay," declared Paulwell.

The mayor of Montego Bay, Noel Donaldson, in welcoming MiPhone to the second city, lauded the company for what he said was its commitment to top-class service.

"With the influx of companies into Jamaica offering telecommunication cellular services, it is certainly good to know that we have a company that has come to us in Montego Bay to offer its services in a context where it is focusing primarily on customer service," he said.

Feeding the multitude

DANGEROUS PETS

Pepper Pot