Government has granted appro-val for cable and internet service provider E-Networks Inc to land its own fibre-optic cable here from Brazil.
“E-Networks has just been given approval to also land their cable from Brazil here,” Head of the Presidential Secretariat (HPS) Dr Roger Luncheon told Stabroek News on Friday. He did not elaborate further.
Coming just days before the May 11th general elections, the decision will raise eyebrows in the cable TV and communications sectors.
The announcement comes on the heels of government revealing that remedial works to its botched billion-dollar fibre-optic cable project from Brazil to Castellani House, Georgetown, have begun.
Under the agreement for the repairs, the contractor, Dax Engineering, will be given a number of pairs of fibres in that cable for his own use. The cable has 12 pairs of fibres.
The HPS did not say when the approval was granted or what the specifics of the E-Networks contract are but stated that the owner of the company, Vishok Persaud, had written government requesting approval to bring its own cable to serve its customers. The government has been accused of favouring E-Networks among other providers in the cable business. Persaud is the son of the late PPP/C executive and Minister, Reepu Daman Persaud.
Stabroek News contacted Persaud on Friday afternoon and he said that he was on an overseas call but the reporter should send an email address to which he would forward information on the project. This was done but up to press time yesterday no information was forthcoming. Stabroek News also made several calls to Persaud’s mobile phone number over the two-day period but those calls went unanswered. Checks at his business headquarters on Camp Street also proved futile.
When E-Networks launched a slew of new services in 2013 as part of the celebrations marking its 10th anniversary questions were raised over whether they were to be enabled by government’s fibre-optic cable. It is unclear how much the E-Networks cable will cost and how it will be financed.
In 2013, the company had launched DreamTV, allowing high definition television channels with clearer, brighter picture; OnFiber, which uses the latest in fibre optic technology to provide internet service via fibre optic lines for reliable downloading and streaming; and Control4, which is said to be an automation solution giving its user the ability to control everything from lighting, music, video, generator and security systems from a single apparatus.
There had been speculation that the government’s fibre optic cable could go towards boosting the capacity of commercial entities, such as those operated by Brian Yong and Persaud, seen by industry actors as favoured by the administration in the allocation of cable frequencies. It has been established that no other cable operator has the capacity on par with what has been allocated to Yong and Persaud—2.5 GHz band frequencies. This prompted concerns over the fairness of the distribution of the frequencies to them.
E-Networks’ cable brings the total number of companies who have been granted permission to land fibre-optic cables here to four; GT&T, Digicel, and Dax Engineering in collaboration with government are the other three.
Digicel has for years expressed an interest in a fibre-optic cable and it was only in October last year that the company was informed that its application for a submarine cable was approved. It is not clear at what stage Digicel’s project is at currently.
Recently, Chief Executive Officer of Dax Engineering, F Mohammed, told Stabroek News that his company had begun remedial works to government’s Lethem to Georgetown fibre optic project and it would cost over $2 billion to fix. “We have started the job about two weeks now and we are going with it…it will cost somewhere there about US$10 million,” he had said.
The project to lay a fibre-optic cable from Brazil to Georgetown to vastly expand internet bandwidth, came back into sharp focus last December when Stabroek News reported that government officials had gone quiet on the project which had missed many deadlines.
Subsequently, Luncheon acknowledged that the project needed “remedial work” but failed to mention that it had been suspended. That announcement was made quietly in the December 12 edition of the Guyana Times by the Project Manager Alexei Ramotar who had not been available to Stabroek News for several weeks to discuss the state of the project.
Experts had posited that salvaging the multi-billion dollar project will be costly and will require government to be frank about key attributes of the project which may in turn expose poor decision-making. “To salvage this project the Guyana government will have to be honest with analysts and the technical remedial team …I doubt they would want to expose the magnitude of their failures and that itself will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions more,” one fibre optic specialist had told Stabroek News.
Luncheon said that according to an assessment, the cable was about 40% damaged and one quote given to government by a company to salvage the project was in excess of US$28 million.
Dax had approached government last year to undertake the rehabilitation works and this year they were called in to commence negotiations.
Details of an agreement reached in March of this year state that government would not have to stand any of the costs for the rehabilitation process but would supply Dax with a number of cables for his own use and Dax will also maintain the cable for a 25-year duration.
However maintenance costs would be shared by government.
“The cable is government owned and the agreement restricts access to the two parties so is only we and Dax in this cable. So it’s government and Dax and Dax has an exclusive arrangement with us nobody, anybody else,” Luncheon said.
