In April last year, a fi­bre op­tic break caused by a bush fire in To­co brought To­ba­go busi­ness­es to their knees.

The break in lines caused a se­vere telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions out­age on the is­land for eight hours, caus­ing dis­rup­tions in ATMs, point of sales ter­mi­nals, in­ter­net and all cell­phone and ca­ble ser­vices. Al­so de­grad­ed was the is­land’s emer­gency man­age­ment ser­vice.

Busi­ness­es were forced to turn away cus­tomers who did not have cash as they could not ac­cept card pay­ments due to the out­age.

In the wake of the dis­rup­tion, the chair­man of the To­ba­go arm of the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce, Cur­tis Williams, la­belled the in­ci­dent a na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions dis­as­ter and he urged lo­cal telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny TSTT to put some­thing in place so that such a sit­u­a­tion would not hap­pen again.

He said then, “This one was the worst. Noth­ing worked. We heard about TSTT do­ing re­dun­dan­cy, but where is the re­dun­dan­cy?”

Next week, the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny is set to un­veil a so­lu­tion to the April 2024 emer­gency at the En­er­gy Con­fer­ence as bmo­bile busi­ness has part­nered with Nep­tune Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, a satel­lite com­pa­ny, to pro­vide a ser­vice which should im­prove busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity and dis­as­ter re­cov­ery.

“This was an ex­cel­lent ex­am­ple. It is where you have a fi­bre break or fi­bre cut, as in To­ba­go. The pre­cise rea­son is about busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity. It is to make sure that you have more than one way to get your traf­fic in and out of your busi­ness. And in to­day’s world where the in­ter­net re­al­ly is pow­er­ing most busi­ness­es, and if your busi­ness is not in­volved in us­ing the in­ter­net, then some­thing is wrong,” said Ju­lian Jor­dan, CEO of Nep­tune Com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

“You need to have more than one re­li­able way to get your in­ter­net traf­fic in and out. So it is called re­dun­dan­cy. And so this is the per­fect way to do that. It’s quite sim­ple.”

This col­lab­o­ra­tion will see bmo­bile busi­ness in­te­grate Nep­tune’s Low Earth Or­bit (LEO) satel­lite so­lu­tions in­to its net­work, in the process of­fer­ing flex­i­ble and re­silient broad­band con­nec­tiv­i­ty.

Nep­tune re­port­ed­ly ap­proached TSTT with the sug­ges­tion and as Dar­ryl Duke, TSTT’s as­sis­tant vice pres­i­dent, busi­ness sales, ex­plained the pitch was time­ly and wel­comed.

“It gives that busi­ness that ex­tra re­silien­cy, es­pe­cial­ly in cas­es of acts of God. I could share some re­al-life sto­ries where, be­cause of dis­as­ters, you have lost that tra­di­tion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty that is cre­at­ed via fi­bre and mo­bile net­works. Satel­lite con­nec­tiv­i­ty gives that ex­tra lay­er of re­silien­cy for those or­gan­i­sa­tion of busi­ness­es that al­ways have to stay con­nect­ed,” he said.

Duke said, “Part of our DNA is to make sure all our cus­tomers are con­nect­ed all the time across the en­tire scope of train­ing to­day. So satel­lite com­mu­ni­ca­tion is one of the trans­for­ma­tion­al tech­nolo­gies for en­ter­prise busi­ness. So this part­ner­ship was some­thing from God. It is very much in line with our ob­jec­tive to keep our cus­tomers with the lat­est, great­est tech­nol­o­gy. It will in­te­grate with our net­work seam­less­ly.”

He added, “This ser­vice is com­ple­men­tary to oth­er prod­ucts and sales that we pro­vide. So the out­ages that you re­fer to, which hap­pen from time to time are due to the in­fra­struc­ture cuts. The use of satel­lite ser­vice, is a com­pli­men­ta­ry ser­vice where you can turn it on to pro­vide that ex­tra con­nec­tiv­i­ty if your pri­ma­ry ser­vice is down, it can al­so be used in rur­al ar­eas where you may not have con­nec­tiv­i­ty avail­able. You can turn on this ser­vice al­most im­me­di­ate­ly. It is 100 per cent on all the time.”

Duke al­so stressed the group did re­search on the ser­vice in terms of cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty, aware that TSTT had been one of many lo­cal com­pa­nies that have fall­en vic­tim to cy­ber­at­tacks re­cent­ly.

“Based on our well-known his­to­ry, bmo­bile has in­vest­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly in our cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty pos­ture. Our vir­tu­al CSO and the sup­port group be­hind them will do the nec­es­sary in­ter­ro­ga­tion and in­ves­ti­ga­tion and due dili­gence to en­sure, be­fore it even touch­es our net­work, that all the checks and bal­ances are ticked at this point in time,” said Duke, “Be­cause, cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty, we may be able to re­veal our blue­print for these checks, but rest as­sured, that is be­ing done be­fore any en­gage­ment has oc­curred.”

Jor­dan not­ed that the im­por­tance of in­ter­net con­nec­tiv­i­ty has be­come cen­tral to busi­ness glob­al­ly, as he stat­ed the ser­vice can run in tan­dem with or as a back­up to cur­rent fi­bre op­tic in­fra­struc­ture.

“Our best-demon­strat­ed prac­tice is to make sure you have more than one way to get your traf­fic in and out of your busi­ness. That’s the To­ba­go ex­am­ple. You can’t just re­ly on one ser­vice. If you do, you’re putting your busi­ness at risk.

“And if your busi­ness needs to be on­line, like a point-of-sale pres­ence, as you men­tioned, you sim­ply are risk­ing not be­ing able to do busi­ness. So they run in par­al­lel, and all of the traf­fic that runs over our net­work is en­crypt­ed end to end. So in terms of cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty, we will fit very tight­ly and neat­ly in­side the over­all pro­to­cols es­tab­lished by TSTT,” said Jor­dan

Jor­dan not­ed the ser­vice has the ad­van­tage of pro­vid­ing ac­cess in ar­eas cur­rent­ly not served by fi­bre ca­ble lines.

“This one you see here (points at satel­lite) the kid lit­er­al­ly is point­ed up at the sky, where the satel­lite con­stel­la­tion is in or­bit, and that’s where the sig­nals get trans­mit­ted be­tween this and the satel­lite in the sky.

“So you do need line of sight, but if it’s mount­ed out­side, you have that line of sight all the time,” said Jor­dan, “in terms of where it’s avail­able, all of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s ge­og­ra­phy, it’s avail­able right now in every sin­gle part of Trinidad and To­ba­go we have cov­ered, so in­clud­ing coastal wa­ters and off­shore fa­cil­i­ties and so on for the oil and gas sec­tor.”

Satel­lite broad­band in­ter­net ser­vices are not for­eign to T&T.

In 2023 US com­pa­ny Star­link in­tro­duced a sim­i­lar ser­vice in the coun­try with res­i­den­tial and busi­ness pack­ages made avail­able.

At launch, bmo­bile’s ser­vice will be geared to­wards busi­ness­es but Duke said as the part­ner­ship with Nep­tune grows, con­sid­er­a­tion will be made for a res­i­den­tial op­tion.