Caricel, Jamaica’s newest mobile telecommunications company, believes that there is more than ample room for a third licensed company.

“There are something like 760,000 households in Jamaica and two-thirds of them can’t get proper access because it is either difficult to or too expensive to,” Caricel’s boss, David Shaw, told the Jamaica Observer, yesterday.

“So, what we are really interested in is serving the underserved market, today. The people who can’t get access. It’s not like taking FLOW on in Cherry Gardens. We have a lot of people who can’t get access to the service and they are the people we are interested in,” Shaw said.

“Our primary reason for being here is to allow for access to the Internet. I mean that is what we are going to try and achieve, and of course you can use different technologies for that, but LTE has some advantages and that is the business that we are going to try and build,” he added.

“We are interested in providing access to those homes that can’t get access to the Internet today. So we are not going to be taking on Digicel and Flow as a mobile player. We are focusing on providing LTE service to those who cannot get access now,” he insisted.

According to the Caricel spokesman, the way that mobile technology has evolved is that it initially evolved to deal with just the volume of voice calls, and the volume of texting, and then the emerging world of data which is incorporated into the world of voice.

“So, there is the evolution from GPRS to Edge and from Edge to 2G, and 2G to 3G, and 3G to 4G, and it has all been about evolving the voice networks to cope with this explosion in the usage of smart phones and data consumption,” he says.

He says that LTE technology has been developed by the suppliers and operators around the world to deal with the world of data, and therefore is more efficient and faster.

“The way that it uses spectrum means that you can cover more of the topography with fewer towers. So, it has got some really clever advantages within the structure of the technology, that enables people to basically consume data as the primary reason for the network being there, rather than it being set up for voice and then having data added as a sort of overlaying network,” Shaw explained.

“It is designed for the world of data and for applications and for Youtube and all that stuff that people want to get access to,” he pointed out.

Shaw has much experience dealing with telecommunications in the region as he only resigned as CEO of LIME Caribbean (Cable and Wireless) in 2013, after four years as head of the company.

As a team, he said that LIME had achieved a great deal during his four years at the helm. Prior to that he worked with AT&T in the US and Energis (the UK’s third largest player which was eventually sold to Cable & Wireless).

Caricel started in March 2014 when Symbiote Investments Ltd applied for a Carrier and Service Provider licence from the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) in Jamaica.

In February 2016, the Ministry of Science, Technology, Energy and Mining (MSTEM) announced that a new mobile network operator licence was being considered by the Jamaican Government.

Despite the change in Governnment in February, it was announced that a new network was approved by the Government but it decided to withhold the operator’s name. On May 20, 2016, it was announced that Symbiote Investments Ltd was the operator that was awarded the licence and it would be operating under the name, Caricel.

Caricel announced it would be rolling out its LTE network within the Kingston Metropolitan Area (Kingston, St Andrew and Portmore) very soon.

The company is said to have invested more than US$50 million in deployment and is looking at spending another US$50 million over the next three years. Caricel has already secured towers islandwide and should be rolling out before the end of the year.