Rhea
Yawching, marketing sales & communications director
for Columbus in the digital backroom at Columbus’ administrative
operations.
Photo:
Mark Lyndersay
By
Mark lyndersay
The advertising seems to be everywhere. Something’s
clearly up at Columbus Communications, the new owners of
the cable business formerly known as CCTT.
Columbus, an ambitious telecommunications player based in
Barbados, is busy rebranding the ageing offerings of its
new acquisition, preparing the groundwork for an expansion
into broadband service and making its first moves into the
market for telephony.
The company clearly hopes to use a decade of experience
as a cable and Internet service provider in the Bahamas
to become a player in a communications market that’s
increasingly being levelled by open technologies.
Over the next seven months, expect to see big changes as
Columbus begins rolling out new cable boxes, new packages,
more aggressive marketing of a marginal Internet service
and finally, a phone that plugs into your cable line.
Some of the changes will take place over your head or under
your feet as Columbus begins replacing old coaxial cables
with fibre connections. Next month, the infrastructure rebuild
will include St Augustine and Valsayn and service will be
delivered for the first time in July to Rio Claro and Cumuto.
It’s a big investment for the new player, with a billion
dollars budgeted for replacing the backbone infrastructure
of cable television delivery, with a further quarter of
a billion dollars budgeted annually for maintaining that
infrastructure.
Most customers will welcome improvements to the cable service
and the expansion of the lineup to 200 video channels and
50 audio channels, but the broadband Internet offerings
offer the most promising change to the local telecommunications
landscape.
Columbus has acquired New World Network, to leverage New
World’s 88.2 per cent interest in the Americas Region
Caribbean Optical-ring System, a broadband undersea fibre
optic cable that connects the Caribbean archipelago reaching
from the US through to Mexico.
The ARCOS ring, as it’s called, hasn’t made landfall
in Trinidad yet, but Columbus is promising enough bandwidth
to serve the entire country.
But improving the technology underpinnings of its business
may be the easiest problem facing Columbus.
According to Rhea Yawching, director of marketing, sales
& communications for Columbus, “Customers can expect
change from a company that’s now operating in a deregulated
environment.”
Among those changes are new arrangements for the cable box
decoders, which the company claims have been widely abused.
The company cites research revealing that most of its customers
use only one of the boxes that are offered under the existing
contract and many of those extra boxes have been distributed
widely to bring illegal service to non-paying customers.
When areas are switched to digital distribution, new arrangements
will kick in and customers will be issued only one free
box (you can rent others). The new boxes are much smarter
and offer, at the premium end, TiVo-like controls for recording
and rewinding live TV. But they are also much smarter about
where they are being used.
Columbus also claims to be aggressively pursuing formal
arrangements with the stations it carries and reports that
many content providers are happy to make what Yawching describes
as “creative” contractual arrangements.
“Columbus
has a legal right to all the channels we carry,” Yawching
said. “We are an English-speaking country, and we believe
that our customers deserve current, English programming.”
Despite the rush of colourful advertising, Flow and Columbus
still have some way to go in resurrecting the heady rush
that cable television promised when competition briefly
made that sector of the telecommunications industry interesting.
The challenges the company faces are daunting. Persuading
customers to accept the changes it’s planning will
require a sobering level of customer interface and some
persuasive selling.
DVD quality video, pay-per-view options and adult programming
matched with powerful parental controls will sway some consumers,
but success will probably hinge on a more fundamental change
in perspective as Columbus tries to move cable service from
being a luxury to a necessity.
That’s only going to happen if it can deliver a real
alternative to TSTT’s DSL broadband offering and deliver
VoIP that works well at price points that will attract a
broad base of customers. If it can pull that off, then it
stands a fair chance of being a local telecommunications
player of significance.
