"I would say that we have invested upwards of $60 million on the delivery technology," said Telegens' executive director, Eugene Ffolkes.

"One of the products is for content providers to carry signals real time to the cable head end, from where it can be delivered to wired homes," Ffolkes added.  "What this does for the content provider is allow them to develop quality, predictable content, knowing that they can deliver it across the island, with home being able to get it at the same time."

Telegens intends to deliver this service with the help of its 30 towers it has erected islandwide.

Ffolkes said that some local cable content providers have already signed up Telegens for the transportation of the services to community cable delivery franchises, but declined to disclose who these were.

Telegens, whose other investors are Jamaican-Canadian entrepreneur Ray Chang and lawyer/businessman Howard Mitchell, began operating in Jamaica delivering telecommunications services to the Jamaica lottery company, before its acquisition by Supreme Ventures.  They invested in excess of $300 million to start the company.

Since then, Telegens has primarily offered data, voice and video circuits to corporate clients, recently linked up with the Chinese telecommunications manufacturer, ZTE, to bid for the development of the broadband network to link libraries and schools across the island to the Internet under the government's eLearning project.  This development is to be financed from the Universal Access Fund which is replenished by a charge of three U.S. cents per minute on international telephone calls terminating in Jamaica on landlines.  The cess is two U.S. cents on calls that terminate on mobile phones.

Telegens has also now moved to take advantage of opportunities which it says are on offer because of how the cable television system has evolved in Jamaica.

COMMUNITY-BASED OPERATORS

As yet there is no national cable delivery system, but rather scores of mostly community-based operators franchised in specific geographic areas.  This has meant that content provider such as RE TV, Hype, Music Plus and others have mostly delivered their programmes to community cable delivery systems on discs or similar media, although in a few cases the providers do use satellite uplinks.

However, Ffolkes argued that his company will now offer a cheaper and consistently better quality alternative to satellite.

"Our service is significantly less expensive and of a higher quality," he said, although the declined to provide comparative costs.  "?  What we are doing is converting the signals to IP then reconverting that signal at the cable head for delivery via cable?  Because it is a totally proprietary network, we are in a better position to control quality."

While Telegens appears set to be first into the market as a system on which content providers can piggy-back for the islandwide delivery of their service, it is likely, in short order, to have competition from Flow, the Michael Lee Chin-backed, fibre optic-based communications operator, that is now building out its network.

Flow has acquired one cable franchise, Sauce Telecommunications Ltd and is in the market for other companies.  In addition, Lee Chin owns the the media outfit, CVM Group, which he acquired as part of Neville Blythe's UGI Group.  CVM includes CVM TV and HOT 102 radio station as well as X-News and Teen Herald newspapers.

These, in addition to cable television companies that Lee Chin owns in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas appear to give Flow, in which he has a 50 per cent stake, the platform for a regional network.

Ffolkes, however, suggested that his company's business model is unlikely to be impacted negatively by anything that Flow is doing, pointing out, for instance, that Telegens' wireless network allowed it to be "nomadic".  It was not restricted to areas where cable is run.

Telegens was also clear about what segment of telecoms market in which in wanted to operate.

"We are a carrier," he said.  "We don't want to get into the business of competing with our clients."

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