"The upgrade will cost well in excess of J$200 million," said Errol K. Miller, CWJ vice-president of corporate communications and corporate affairs, in response to Sunday Business questions.  "The upgrade will be done to devices and components that eventually connect to the fibre ring."

Enhanced Services

The upgrading and expansion work will begin on Wednesday and will ready the company to better offer enhanced services, including Next Generation broadband services, which are essentially high-quality and innovative services such as video on demand.

Having grown its Internet customer base significantly since 2005, CWJ is currently facing challenges, such as sluggishness and interruptions to service, "largely as a result of the need for new equipment as much of the old equipment has outlived its usefulness," according to Miller.

For instance, CWJ reported that between December 25 and 27, some of its customers experienced a loss of Internet service due to equipment failure, while previous upgrade work, including a major undertaking on December 13 had late-night users browsing the web at a snail's pace.

But the planned upgrade which will run to the end of March and which is aimed at improving the "reliability of its ADSL service and increasing the availability of bandwidth for our subscribers," will eliminate overcapacity, according to Miller.

"The improved infrastructure will support upwards of 128,000 customers," added Miller.

"Once the upgrade has been completed, we anticipate that the problems that are currently being experienced by our customers (mainly slow browsing and difficulty accessing e-mail will be reduced considerably," said Miller.  "In fact we are confident that our customers will immediately notice an improvement in their connection speed.  "

The planned upgrade comes months ahead of Digicel wireless broadband service, which will be launched to retail customers in June, while Flow, the broadband internet service provider which began offering service to residential customers last August after landing and configuring its underwater fibre optic cable connecting Jamaica to the U.S., is slowly rolling out its service, targeting areas where they are licensed to offer subscriber cable television.

CWJ has its own strategy for the rolling out of wireless service - WiMax.

"We will offer WiMax primarily in situations where the geographic terrain makes it difficult to deliver tradition ADSL service," said Miller.  "In the event that we discover that customers have particular difficulty connecting to the internet via ADSL, then WiMax is a possible solution."

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