By Al Edwards, Business Co-ordinatorOCEANIC DIGITAL Communications (ODC), the United States telecoms company which earlier this year acquired 100 per cent interest in Centennial Digital Jamaica's (CDJ) operations, yesterday outlined its plans for Jamaica which includes putting up 6 new cell sites thereby taking the number to 35.
It needs 83 cell sites to cover the entire island.
Speaking at a press conference held at Centennial's headquarters on Knutsford Boulevard, New Kingston, ODC's chief executive officer, Albert Gencarella said: "Our job here was to come back into the market and get it restarted. Over the last several months we haven't said very much and we have kept a low profile.
"We needed our financial partners to get comfortable with the market and we needed to define how we would operate the business. We expect by the middle of next year to have completed our islandwide buildout throughout the country. We have also initiated construction of six new cell sites in addition to the eleven sites we have turned on over the last six months.
"Our goal is to complete the southern part of the island and with six new sites we will have seamless coverage. We will then roll out coverage in Montego Bay and then Ocho Rios and look to cover the entire island by the middle of 2003."
Earlier this month the Financial Gleaner reported that ODC was looking to sell the building on Knutsford Boulevard that housed Centennial's headquarters for US$5 million. Mr. Gencarella, based in New York, confirmed that the building was up for sale and that realtors were looking at finding potential buyers.
"We have no reason to own such a large building. We occupy 2 floors of the building and operate our switching facility from there as well as apparatus on the roof top and we will continue to have that there but as to the rest of the building we don't need to maintain an interest in that so we have decided to let a professional manager sell the building. We are telephone operators not realtors."
OCD will be launching some new services and products on the market and has rolled out a package called "Talk Time" which is a prepaid service. The phone is pre-programmed with usage time already built in. Under the plan, for a service package priced at $1,995, the customer gets the equivalent of $1,995 worth of minutes to make calls anywhere in Jamaica or overseas, plus the cellular phone at no extra cost. The phone is entirely free. When the owner has used up the pre-programmed minutes, phonecards will have to be bought to continue using the phone to make calls.
The product is being marketed under the name "MiPhone Fast" and the service packages are available in pharmacies and stores.
Prepaid phonecards are available at Lotto outlets islandwide or at various dealer outlets.
ODJ's chief executive officer, Rafael Salome emphatically declared that the American company is here to stay and will not be looking for an early exit out of the country.
"Over the last year we have spent in the region of US$100 million both for operating capital and network equipment and we are planning to spend another US$30 million to complete the islandwide network coverage," Mr. Salome said. "What we have done in the past few months is to assess what is going on in the company and we have decided to redefine the way we sell.
"We will be moving away from a direct sales channel, i.e. owning our own stores to a more indirect channel with the focus placed on distribution with sales teams pushing our products. The reason behind that is we want to be more agile and flexible in regards to deploring our presence throughout the island. We have cut our number of stores from 5 to 2. The stores were proving very expensive for us and we have closed them because they proved not to be the fastest way to deploy our sales experts.
"We have been sleeping but now we want to be a very aggressive contender in the market. What we see in the future is we don't intend on becoming the biggest player in the market but we want to be the leaders which means we set the terms of the game. Our air time rates are the lowest in the market, our long distances rates are very competitive too."
Mr. Salome underscored his position by making it clear that the aim was to have full coverage with quality. He observed that ODJ's competitors, Digicel and Cable & Wireless, though they operated full coverage, quality has not always been consistent.
He said the system ODJ uses, CDMA is capable of handling 3 or 4 times the traffic TDMA (used by C&W) and GSM (used by Digicel) cell sites can handle. He pointed out that with CDMA it is impossible for someone to illegally eavesdrop on someone's conversation. Code division makes it practically impossible for someone to use a scanner and listen to a conversation. This is something that can be done by buying a US$50 scanner purchased from Radio Shack.
"Once we have coverage throughout the island ,the network we have will be the best on the island. We will be introducing data services next year. This will include wireless high speed Internet access. This will be three times as fast as dialup," added Mr. Salome.
Vice President for Technical Services, Alejandro Pacheco told Wednesday Business that ODJ had also recently bought out Lucent's interest and is financially stable with a strong partner and no significant debt.
" I honestly do feel we will have the best technology in the market. This technology will allow us to become the market leaders. We will be able to offer services that none of the other competitors in this market are going to even come close to and we will be doing this with very little debt so our cost structure will be much lower than anybody else thereby giving us price advantage.
It takes anywhere between 8 to 12 weeks to build a cell site and we have built about 10 sites in the last four months so that gives you an indication of our progress. We have started another 6 with the idea of going out west from Kingston, to Spanish Town, May Pen, Mandeville all the way out to Black River. The current service we offer in Kingston is far superior to our opposition in terms of the quality of the voice, the drop calls and our customer service is much better."
ODJ currently has a customer base of 30,000 and is looking to increase that figure to 150,000 over the next 12 months.
