IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

Many Caribbean livelihoods are made and lost around seasonal fluctuations in foreigners’ travel. For much of the region, tourism, an all-too-inefficient form of intraregional human traffic, is economic lifeblood. But for one group of Caribbean islands, a different kind of traffic is generating a new model for intraregional economic partnership.

Internet traffic—data packets that move across telecommunications networks—is opening new economic possibilities to countries with a historical dependence on tourism. The governments of Grenada, St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines are now working together to update their on-island Internet infrastructure, as part of a wider project to upgrade the data networks across the region.

Read more: CARICOM: Why data infrastructure upgrades are the next step in regional evolution

Information and Communication Technology is the new frontier for regional integration in the Caribbean, CARICOM Secretary General Irwin LaRocque said in a speech Friday.

The Secretary General, who was addressing the opening ceremony of the Forty-Eighth Special Meeting of the Council for Trade and Economic Development on Information and Communications Technology in Grenada, said a renewed focus on ICT in the Caribbean was critical.

Read more: CARICOM: LaRocque: ICT Is the New Frontier For Caribbean Integration

The use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) in the Caribbean countries will work best when Governments take the lead in the transformation, alluded Secretary-General Bernadette Lewis of the CARICOM instituted Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU).

The secretary-general told the Observer during the Sept. 22 to 26 CTU/ICT Week of Activities that the organization is persuading governments to be early adopters of ICT technologies and lead their countries into the “evolving information age”.

Read more: Governments Should Lead ICT Adoption In Caribbean Nations

Data is rapidly overtaking voice in global consumer usage, and global mobile data traffic doubled between 2011 and 2012. What is driving this demand, according to legal and regulatory consultant at the Ministry of Science and Technology Lisa Agard, is the proliferation of smart devices. “We are no longer accepting as consumers of having a device that only delivers voice services or that has limited features,” said Agard, speaking at the Caribbean ICT ministers’ forum, held at the Hyatt Regency, Port-of-Spain, yesterday.

“We want to have full data and video capabilities on all our devices wherever we are.” In Japan, she said, 50 per cent of the average revenue per user (ARPU) is derived from mobile data, as compared to a low five per cent for the Caribbean region. This disparity presents both an opportunity and a challenge for regulators and governments in the region to make efforts to grow that demand.

Read more: Caribbean Region lagging in data usage