Telecom talk.

• Author: Luxner, Larry
• Position: !Ojo! - Digicel Group Ltd.

UNTIL RECENTLY, overcrowded Haiti and sparsely populated Guyana shared a reputation for spotty mobile phone service that was way too expensive for all but the richest segments of society.

No longer. Digicel Group Ltd.--incorporated in Bermuda and headquartered in Jamaica--is finally bringing wireless to the masses in both countries.

Last summer, the Irish-financed telecom giant launched operations in Haiti, its twenty-first market. Barely 10 months later, it has turned more than a million of Haiti's 8.5 million inhabitants into prepaid customers, boosting the country's combined fixed and mobile penetration from 5 percent to 20 percent.

"If companies looked only at per-capita income, no one would invest in a market like Haiti," said Digicel's CEO, Colin Delves. "But there's a lot of cash in that market, thanks to a huge amount of remittance income. We're bringing in something people haven't had before."

Digicel hopes to replicate that success in Guyana, South America's only English-speaking nation. In mid-February, after acquiring that country's second largest operator, U Mobile, it began offering services throughout the Idaho-sized nation of 800,000, opening 50 stores and investing more than US$60 million in its operations there. Its chief rival is Guyana Telephone & Telegraph, a unit of Virgin Islands-based Atlantic Tele-Network, which has dominated telecom services in Guyana for years.

"Since we launched, we've more than doubled the number of subscribers," Delves says. "We swapped out the existing Nortel network with Ericsson, introduced 24/7 customer care, and have dramatically improved the number of retail outlets."

Delves says his company now operates in 22 markets throughout the Caribbean. Of its 4.1 million customers, 1.6 million are in Jamaica, where it controls 70 percent of the mobile market (rival Cable & Wireless has most of the remaining 30 percent).

"We have added nine new markets and 2.1 million subscribers in the last nine months," he said. "We see the best markets as those where you can offer the best network, the best choice, the best customer care, and the best range of handsets, particularly when the existing population is being under-served by the incumbent. Basically, our strategy is to provide first class telecom services to markets where they have been historically given second-rate service."

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