Minister of Industry, Technology, Energy and Commerce, Phillip Paulwell has urged private sector companies to take on the challenge of providing Jamaicans with cheaper computers and internet packages, in pretty much the same way that cellular companies have been providing customers with inexpensive phones.

The minister pointed out, for example, that cell phones now have an 82 per cent penetration rate, while the internet stood at 10 per cent.
In fact, he noted that while Jamaica led the hemisphere in mobile phone penetration, internet penetration lagged behind that of other dynamic markets such as in Asia.

Rodney Davis (second right), president and CEO of Cable & Wireless Jamaica (CWJ) greets Dr Jerrol Thompson, president of the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU) and Minister of Telecommunications, Science, Technology and Industry in St Vincent and the Grenadines (far left), while Phillip Paulwell, Minister of Industry, Technology, Energy and Commerce, and Professor Neville Ying, executive director of the Mona School of Business at the University of the West Indies, look on. The four met at the opening ceremony of the CTU's Second Annual World Telecommunications Day Symposium, which was held on Wednesday at the Hilton Kingston Hotel. The Symposium, which was organised by the Mona School of Business and is sponsored by CWJ, ended on Friday.

Since the government's liberalisation process in 2000, growth in cellular mobile subscribers increased from approximately 300,000 subscribers to nearly two million today. Mobile penetration in Jamaica exceeds that of the rest of the Caribbean and even North America, with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) world telecommunications index for 2005 indicating a mobile penetration rate of 82.2 per cent, according to the technology minister.

"One of the challenges we have put to the private sector is to see the computer as you now see the telephone instrument. At one time the price of the cell phone was too high for the average person, now it is part of a package of services," Paulwell said.

Added Paulwell: "We believe we are some distance away from bridging this digital divide because so many of our people are without computers."

He was making a presentation at the launch of the World Telecommunication Day Symposium and exhibition at the Hilton Hotel in Kingston on Wednesday.

The recent introduction of fibre optic and wireless broadband technology to the island, Paulwell said, would greatly enhance Jamaica's telecommunications capacity. But he argued that without access to computers, the facility would never be maximised.

"I am proposing that we, as providers, and the private sector now look at how we are going to expand this market from 10 per cent internet access to over 40 per cent, by increasing the population of computers," Paulwell remarked.

"It is one thing to have broad band but unless your people have access to enable that broad band to work then it won't materialise," he added.

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