After sustaining heavy damage during Hurricane Melissa, telecoms provider Digicel says it will be assessing the possibility of using more underground fibre systems as part of a broader effort to strengthen its network against future storms.

Chief Executive Officer Stephen Murad shared the company’s thinking during Wednesday’s sitting of the Infrastructure and Physical Development Committee at Gordon House during which Members of Parliament (MPs) pressed Digicel to outline long-term plans for safeguarding national connectivity.

St Andrew Western MP Duane Smith urged Digicel to accelerate the plans, arguing that Jamaica cannot continue rebuilding the same vulnerable systems after every major natural disaster.

“Unfortunately, more hurricanes are likely to come. We can have a Category 5 next year again, we can have one next week, God forbid, and a lot of the services that you offer, they’re dependent on other people, other companies. You mentioned Flow, you mentioned JPS (Jamaica Public Service), so there’s a lot of things that are outside of your hands,” said Smith.

He also pointed to the repeated damage to rooftop towers — 37 of which were reported down — and warned that the country could easily find itself rebuilding the same structures months from now.

“A tropical storm can come in two weeks and blow them down again and we’ll go right back to where we’re coming from. So the conversation has to begin.. how we can start to put our utilities underground, regardless of the cost,” said Smith.

In response, Murad told the committee that Digicel is examining alternative designs, including micro-trenched underground fibre, through a dedicated internal work stream.

However, he stressed that such a transition would require coordination at the national level. He said he has already “been feeding in” to a Government initiative aimed at establishing a national infrastructure agreement.

“We’re very open to a public-private partnership joint venture. We’re always very open to these things, as you can imagine. But, obviously, I’m impatient, like all of my fellow Jamaican customers are as well, so I also need action. So we are looking at, as a business, what are the options for us. So you think about power versus fibre and in the case of power it would need deep, deep trenching,” he said.

Murad explained that underground installation brings its own technical demands, including proper geographic tagging so that fibre routes are not damaged during construction or roadworks.

“…What I don’t want is all of a sudden someone is doing some road work, and all of a sudden digs and doesn’t check on the map to see where there is a structural ID… it can’t be that people all of a sudden just start digging on the ground and we hope for the best, we need policy,” he said.

“We need urbanisation policy to help protect that, because you can imagine, I dread to think how much it would be at this point to work that out. It’s in the millions and millions, probably in the tens of millions of US [dollars] to do that work and I’m not saying that that’s not important, but can’t just do it on my own and then hope for the best,” he added.

Drawing on experience from other markets, Murad noted that underground systems, though more protected, are not flawless.

“In terms of a measure of protecting our infrastructure, it’s not foolproof, I’ll be honest with you. Water ingress, infestation, all of those will happen. Rats, in particular, like to chew cables and nest out of those cables. Ask anybody from Bermuda they will tell you every single day that’s what drives their engineers up a wall… and I say this because it’s not like we’re not thinking about it [and] it’s not that we don’t have experience around the region as well, we have a huge amount of experience in that so we’re thinking strategically,” he said.

Still, he insisted that Digicel sees long-term value in strengthening Jamaica’s telecommunications backbone.

“We need the group’s power and support to look at how do we protect ourselves better in the future as a company and a country, I’m a large employer and the Jamaica business has 1,000 people directly, and I probably have another 1,000 third-party contractors that rely on me every single day. The group team is almost 800 people there as well so we’re a large Jamaican employer as well so we have a duty of care also to the country. So it’s important that we do it properly and not half a job,” he said.