THE relentless march towards a future powered by the Internet and travelling on optical fibre cables, is about to envelop schools, public libraries and post offices, including remote areas of Jamaica.

Over the next 18 months, the Government and telecommunications providers LIME and Flow will be combining to roll out a high-speed broadband service that will change the way many ordinary Jamaicans communicate from isolated pockets of the island.

Minister without portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister, Daryl Vaz, who has responsibility for telecommunications, signed the $543-million pact with the telecoms providers yesterday and immediately promised that the deployment of high-speed Internet services would be accelerated in the associated communities and within communities traversed by the optical fibre cables on which the services would be provided.

“Any community, however remote, which has a public secondary or high school will be provided with facilities for Internet access,” an animated Vaz told the signing ceremony at Jamaica House in Kingston.

According to Vaz, the plan is to increase the number of institutions throughout the life of the project.

The five-year project is expected to facilitate modern services such as video conferencing as well as more efficient use of teaching resources through the establishment of virtual classes. It will also provide access to the server farm, hosting critical educational resources.

“These resources will allow students to access stored subject matter lessons and to take online practice tests and examinations to improve their understanding and knowledge of selected subject matters,” he added.

Vaz said the providers would be held to the agreed standard of 99.9 per cent availability with the target being for no more than an accumulative total of 8.77 hours serviced degradation or downtime per year.

Funding for the build-out of the islandwide broadband network is from the Universal Access Fund Company Limited (UAFCL), which manages the levy charged to telecommunications companies for incoming international calls to Jamaica.

The fund has already provided approximately $2.4 billion for teacher education and school projects through the e-Learning project.

Dr Andre Foote, chairman of the UAFCL, said the agreement took longer than usual to reach this stage as Government took the time to ensure it would not be rendered obsolete by technology in the near future or governmental duplication.

“The agreements we enter into today are intending to benefit the people of Jamaica; we will hold our partners accountable for their performance,” he said.

Hugh Cross, managing director of the UAFCL, said although the current provision was for a 100 megabits per second, there was a stipulation that this could be evolved to one one gigabit per second as the demand increased.

He said currently there were 283 institutions under contract with more to be added during the life of the project.

Garry Sinclair, managing director for LIME in Jamaica and Cayman Islands, said while the company was excited at the commercial side of the project, the real satisfaction came from knowing it would be part of an initiative that would be a critical catalyst in Jamaica’s development.

He noted that the project involved two major areas where LIME had been working tirelessly to make a difference — the infusion of the ICT in education and increasing of access to ICT to the general population to bridge the digital divide with Jamaica, as well as between more developed nations.

“Specifically, we have been doing this through our provision of free Internet to more than 300 schools and the establishment of several community-based cyber-clubs across the island,” he said.

Michele English, president and chief operating officer of Flow, said this had significant benefits to the schools, particularly those in more remote areas.

Jamaica, she said, had access to the best broadband and converge technology which had made the country among the top 15 countries in the world, ranking higher than the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.

“It is a pretty significant move to have this kind of technology broadly available throughout the country,” she said.