Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo yesterday announced that the PPP/C government is hopeful of ending the three-decade monopoly of the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph (GTT) on international voice and data transmissions by next week, thereby delivering on the long promised liberalisation of the telecommunications sector.
“Liberalisation is a promise that we made a long time ago. Both parties agreed to this and we need to get it implemented. We are hoping by next week that could happen but we had to go through a tonne of technical work doing that,” Jagdeo told a news conference yesterday at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre. “That sets the basis for 5G services, improvements in cell services, more competition, allowing more fibre optic to come. It sets up the basis for an ICT platform [through] which we want to create thousands of jobs…,” he added.
This would pave the way for cellular services provider Digicel to land its own fibre optic cable and for the expansion of services of E-Networks, which has landed a subsea cable and has set up a substation. GTT has raised concerns over the laying of the E-Networks cable, which it maintained was done without the necessary approvals.