Jamaica-based Caribbean telecom giant Digicel has a presence in over a dozen countries in the region. Digicel officially launched operations on the Haitian market in May to much resistance from local private telecoms Haitel and Comcel but bloggers and other web commentators seem to agree that Digicel’s presence on the Haitian market is actually a good thing for local consumers’ pockets, for their safety as well as potential job creation.

Launching a $130 million investment

Martiniquan blogger InternetRapide.com chronicled (Fr) the launch when it happened in early May:

Les offres de DIGICEL, quatrième opérateur mobile à Haïti sont commercialisées depuis ce 3 mai 2006.
Digicel a obtenu une licence d'exploitation d'un réseau GSM sur l'île depuis juin 2005; les autres opérateurs déjà présents à Haïti s'appuient sur des réseaux CDMA et TDMA (…)Ce lancement à Haïti est une étape importante dans le développement du groupe du magnat irlandais Denis O'Brien, et représente plus de 130 millions de dollars d'investissement (USD).

A Haitian creole-speaking commentator seemed enthusiastic (Kr) about the launch in her comment on Internetrapide.com's blog:

digicel vous etes le meilleur. si nous bezouin couvri haiti , se pou nou ale nan tout ti coin,rive tout kote zote pa rive. mete antenne nan tout ti commune kote zote pa la, epi na we rezulta. tout moun ap vi-n jouin nou. kiles nap commencer activer boite gen anpil moun kap tann nou pou activation merci je vous aime

Jobs and Investment, Please

Another poster, Darline Joseph, who identified herself as a professional living in Haiti asked (Fr) how she could find work with the company. Indeed, many Haitians looking for job and business opportunities are jumping on the Digicel wagon.

At the HaitiXchange.com message boards, poster Ape_man seemed excited about the job prospects for Haitians:

the good thing about this is that since Haiti speaks a language not spoken by the rest of the greater Caribbean, they will have to employ kreyol/french speaking customer service reps and technicians to assist the callers…this means real jobs for Haitians…as opposed to Cables and Wireless employees that I know who live in Jamaica and support all the Caribbean nations that the company is in being that they all speak English they can do that…in this case, Digicel will have to accomodate Haitians thus must have Haitians in their staff at least in the supporting roles…not to mention the Haitians engineers that will be employed through this deal…

Digicel Staff Launch Party, Haiti. By Pete Kaholupalan.

The Jamaica Gleaner explained how some scrambled to be part of Digicel's 200 dealer-network:

A typical Haitian dealer is Jean-Max Garoute whose business complex is located on the airport road only two minutes from Haiti's notorious Cite Soleil slum (Sun City in English). Jean-Max, whose main business is operating a gas station (and whose family business is the manufacturing of clay tiles), became a dealer simply by writing Digicel a letter, and subsequently passing an interview. Since he opened he says, “Business has been phenomenal, with customers lining up from 5:00 a.m. to buy phones.”

According to Jean-Max, “If I had more phones, I could sell 1000 a day.” The biggest seller is the cheapest phone - the Motorola C115. Jean-Max says it has been popularly named the ‘huit million' or eight million in English to reflect the fact that the entire Haitian population wants to own one, so that they can finally communicate with their families abroad.

Under the subtitle “An Entrepreneurial Revolution in Haiti,” the Gleaner also reported on CEO Denis O'Brien's enthusiasm for the Haitian market:

At its huge VIP Haiti launch party overlooking Port au Prince on Wednesday night, Digicel's founder, billionaire entrepreneur Denis O'Brien, told the more than one thousand leading members of the Haitian business community (a significant portion of whom were now Digicel dealers) that Haiti and the Caribbean were “One of the most entrepreneurial
regions in the world and we hope that Digicel's entry into Haiti is helping to position the country as a good place to invest in business and that we will see other corporations following our example.” Asked why he had invested in ‘risky' Haiti, Mr. O'Brien added that when he first came to Haiti two years ago, everybody was ‘buying and selling - it was like a bazaar'. But he believed the market opportunity outweighed the macroeconomic risks, and believed that with Digicel's arrival the ‘foreign investment community is waking up to the opportunity.' Mr. O'Brien announced that due to the ‘avalanche' of support for Digicel's GSM network, he had decided to increase his initial investment of US$130 million by another US$50 million over the next few months.

Advertising: The First Battle

Private Haitian telecoms initially reacted to Digicel’s presence in Haiti through regulatory wars having to do with advertising. Local telecom regulatory body CONATEL weighed in against DIGICEL. According to Haitian newsfeed Radio Kiskeya (Fr) : “The arrival of Caribbean operator Digicel triggered a counter-offensive from its Haitian competitors.” Haitel and Comcel, aided by CONATEL cried foul at a commercial pamphlet issued by Digicel that offered trade-ins of non-compatible devices, explains the feed. CONATEL criticized the pamphlets alleging the naming of competitors in advertising was not welcome in Haiti.

The controversial advertising blitz included a sponsorhip of the Haitian Federation of Soccer, said blogger Greg at InternetRapide.com:

Depuis le mois de mars Digicel est le principal sponsor de la Fédération Haïtienne de Football. Pour un million de dollars (USD), selon les termes du partenariat, la première ligue cesse de s’appeler “championnat national de première division” pour devenir le “Championnat Digicel de football”.

Ex-pat missionary blogger T&T & Tribe, was a little overwhelmed by all the advertising and wondered whether it was not creating the illusion of a need:

“Digicel” entered the cell phone market here in Haiti. They are genius marketers. Everywhere you look there are red and white signs and banners and ads. The advertising all showed up seemingly overnight all over the city. They rented a ton of office spaces and painted the outside of each one red. They are experiencing lines that go around the block. Many of the people in line don't even know what's going on inside. We see people wearing Digicel hats and t-shirts all along the highway heading to our village.

Maybe the hype is because of their massive ad campaign, maybe it is because the other two cell phone options are a joke. Either way, they found a way to create in the mind of the consumer a NEED for new cell phone service. People in Haiti are clamoring for a device that will probably not work very well, that they've lived without up until now, and will cost more than feeding a family of four for a week.

Interconnection: The Sticking Point

Back in May blogger InternetRapide.com believed that interconnection negotiations with Haitel and Comcel would be easy:

Les négociations d'interconnexion avec TELECO, opérateur des lignes fixes et opérateur mobile détenu principalement par l'Etat Haïtien, ont été longues et difficiles, mais les parties sont parvenues à un accord Jeudi dernier. Les négociations avec les deux autres opérateurs, HAITEL et COMCEL-VOILA devraient elles aussi aboutir rapidement (même si ce dernier semble se montrer peu coopératif).

Indeed, Haitian newsfeed AlterPresse reported that CONATEL's director believed that (Fr) “interconnection would take place before the end of May 2006, emphasizing that no company could escape the interconnection requirement.”

But a showdown is taking place between the pre-existing cell phone operators and Digicel over the issue of interconnection: talks took place on May 30 between [local Telecom regulatory body] CONATEL and the various private mobile operators (Haitel, Comcel and newly arrived Digicel) that, according to AlterPresse, ended without an expected agreement on the issue of interconnection.

Though Haitel originally seemed more amenable to an agreement on interconnection than did Comcel, in the last three weeks, the chemistry between Haitel and Digicel seems to have evaporated and, according to AlterPresse, it is now asking that certain demands be fulfilled before it fully agrees to it. Its head, Franck Cine, stated that:

« tout ce que nous réclamons, c’est une compétition loyale et un traitement égal pour tous les opérateurs de téléphonie de la part de l’Etat Haïtien».

Interconnection tests scheduled for June 7 did not take place, reports (Fr) AlterPresse.

But, according to the Jamaica Gleaner, Digicel CEO Denis O'Brien believes the interconnection issue may be moot:

Stating that, “he had never seen a market like it” he argued Digicel's success had been so great that soon the interconnection issue with their competition would become irrelevant as Haitians were just throwing away their other phones.

Code Wars: No to a Jamaican Code on Haitian Soil

While no resolution has yet been reached on the interconnection issue, Marcel Montaigne, the head of CONATEL, threatened on June 6 to sanction Digicel over the alleged use of a Jamaican code on Haitian soil, according to (Fr) AlterPresse.

[Le] directeur du CONATEL (…) avait déclaré, nous citons : « Nous sommes un Etat souverain et nous ne pouvons accepter l'utilisation d'un code attribué à un autre pays autre que chez nous », fin de citation.

According to the same story, Digicel rebutted that the use of the code is neither fraudulent or competitively unfair nor does it represent a threat to international security, to billing or taxation. It explained that many other operators use codes in more than one country. It quoted Digicel:

« depuis décembre 2005, après trois années de débats, un groupe d'experts internationaux (…) a conclu que la pratique d'utiliser un MCC/MNC (identification du pays de rattachement / réseau de rattachement) dans plus d'un pays ne serait plus interdite ».

Prices Driven Down

Blog and local press commentators concur that Digicel's presence on the Haitian market has driven prices down:

Says AlterPresse:

La concurrence, provoquée sur le marché de la téléphonie mobile par le lancement en grande pompe des activités du géant régional Digicel, le 3 mai 2006, a eu très vite pour effet de forcer les autres compagnies de téléphonie mobile à revoir leur base de tarification et à offrir un certain nombre d' « avantages » à leur clientèle.

The Jamaica Gleaner reported a differential in Digicel cell phone prices:

The phone is priced at 900 Haitian goudes (about J$1,500), and is significantly cheaper than the competition's offering at around J$2,600. This price is much cheaper than the J$6,500 it took to buy a phone before Digicel's arrival, reflecting the high degree of subsidy by Digicel of the cost of buying the phone, which it expects to recoup from the increased market penetration.

Moose's Adventures Abroad, a blog kept by an American Digicel employee, wrote:

People lined up for phones starting at 4am the night before our launch. Line-ups were hours long at EVERY store in the country. It is the first time affordable mobile phones have been available in Haiti. The current provider charges:
i. $50 USD to activate
ii. cheapest phone = $60
iii. You pay to make and receive calls
iv. Rates are per-minute

Our charges:
i. $0 to activate
ii. Three phones available for under $20
iii. You only pay to make calls
iv. Rates are per-second

People cannot afford mobile telephony at the current rates - they can afford it now. The number of mobile subscribers in the country could go from 3-4% to 60-80% (this is all speculation on my part). Honestly - it is a bit of a revolution - there are no landline phone networks either so this is the first time many people in Haiti will ever have a phone!

Digicel Launch Festivities, Haiti. By Pete Kaholupalan.

The Buzz in Blogs and on the HaitiXchange.com Message Board

Says Mooses Adventures Abroad,

I know many people will argue that we are not in fact revolutionizing the country and that this is consumerism in its worst way. I disagree for a number of reasons -
1. the phones we market and push are the phones under $20 USD.
2. We don't accept credit and we don't reduce the price of phones and force them to take long contracts (in the mass market) like you see in North America. If a person wants to get an expensive phone they have to save up for it and in that case I think it is a legitimate spend.
3. Phones are always a balance of style versus function. In developing countries the large portion of the selection is based on price and function with style lagging behind that.
4. I have heard of a direct correlation between telecom growth and GDP growth in developing countries (not in the developed world). I can't find anything strong that correlates it… but telecom is an enabler. If teleco and technology improves communications improve which facilitates economic growtprovides technical support and services for progressive organizations to improve their outreach and efficiency by using online applications in new ways to meet off line goals.h over all. Yes I realize this is very glossy, high-level and weak.

In the end I hope this is a turning point in the Haitian economy and that this investment hopefully shows a successful business model which will be a catalyst for future development and investment.

Over at the blog of Development Seed, an organization that “provides technical support and services for progressive organizations to improve their outreach and efficiency, ” Bonnie Bogle writes:

There are just 140,000 landlines and 540,000 cell phones in the country of more than 8 million people. (…) Hopefully, that’s beginning to change. Yesterday Digicel, the largest mobile phone operator in the Caribbean, launched service in the country. It will be Haiti’s first second GSM provider and the first to offer service available throughout the country. There’s no doubt that with such a low number of mobile phone users, Haiti could be a very large potential market. (…)

At the very least, Digicel’s entrance into Haiti will provide needed competition for Haiti’s current mobile providers, which are plagued by user complaints. Also at $130 million, it’s a huge investment for a country that notoriously lacks foreign investment. So big that Digicel says it’s “the largest corporate investment in the country from an international company.”

An improved mobile phone system, especially one that offers services like text messaging more affordably, will allow aid organizations and average Haitians to avoid some of the country’s security risks and give them better access to information. And if it’s true about a offering a reliable nationwide network, that will make communication much easier considering that many towns in Haiti are pretty hard to travel to.

At HaitiXchange.com, poster New Haiking agreed that Digicel was good news for Haiti and offered some interesting analysis of (and advice to) various Caribbean and Haitian telecoms:

This is indeed good news no matter which angle you are looking at it, it has some negatives , but Denis O'Brien is the Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com)of cellular phones. Here is the strategy guys, Digicel is an Irish company based in the Caribbean , the company has numerous shell corporations in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands to make sure its windfall profits are not taxed at EU rates.The direct competition is not really Comcel, or Haitel , it's Cable &Wirelless, the British telephone giant that has Vodafone as its main cometitor in Europe.Cable &Wirelless has monopolized the Caribbean telephone market for the last 30 years especially the former and current British colonies, and that's what Denis Obrien is trying to change. Digicel could absorb Haitel easily by buying it out from its current owner Verizon-MCI as it does in other markets in the Caribbean. Verizon smartly sold their cellular operations (Verizon Dominicana)in the DR to Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire owner of America Movil and Omnilife.So now it's going to be Digicel,Cable &Wirelless, America Movil, and Cingular fighting to be the Pan-Caribbean cellular network, but which tehcnology will win , GSM or CDMA.

Haiti wins anyway, there are about 5 million people who can be turn into customers in the next 5 years, that growth is incredible if the country stays stable, there are currently only 150, 000 cellular phone users in Haiti, Comcel and Haitel have to reivented themselves, Comcel should tried to expand into the DR by making an alliance with America Movil so , Western Wirelless and Verizon-MCI should follow Denis Obrien and take a bet ,because the Irishman said he can get one billion dollars out the Caribbean in the next 10 years with about 250 million dollars of invesments, and I am talking about net profits, not total sales.

Zoklo, another HaitiXchange.com poster, chimed in with what he learned from a friend who lives in Haiti:

A friend of mine in Haiti just told me that Digicel is making huge waves over there. One of the big contenders was Voila, which was making a big impact during carnival. They sponsored many floats and bands. I'm not sure who their aren't company is, but Digicel is giving them a run for their money.

My friend tells me that Digicel is accepting Voila trade-ins for free Digicel phones and that a lot of people who were working for Voila have quit their jobs.

See more Digicel, Haiti photos by Pete Kaholupalan.

Though most other events on the CSA programme were aimed at specialist audiences, we decided early on that our “roundtable” would be distinctly unacademic in format. After brief introductions by Dr. Bruce Paddington of the University of the West Indies, our nominal moderator (who came armed with newspaper and magazine clippings demonstrating the ascendancy of citizen media, including one from a Trinidad and Tobago daily on the Alaa detention), we opened by playing a podcast recorded the previous day, in which Georgia and I asked a series of CSA delegates a not-so-straightforward question: “What does ‘Caribbean' mean to you?” You can listen to the resulting presentation here:

Next we examined, via a Google wildcard search, some of the stereotypes of “Caribbeanness” that flourish on the Web. (Thanks to the diligent IT technicians of the National Library, we had Georgia's PowerBook plugged into an overhead projector, and were able to show the audience live webpages on a big screen.) We contrasted these sun-sand-sea clichés with examples of the real issues and questions on the minds of a cross-section of Caribbean bloggers, including Geoffrey Philp, Francomenz, Francis Wade, Taran Rampersad, Elspeth Duncan, Matthew Hunte, Guyana Gyal, and Karen Walrond.

We quickly decided to deviate from the rough “script” we'd prepared, to allow the dialogue to range freely and encourage the small audience to interrupt with questions. The result was highly interactive, to say the least. The mostly non-Caribbean audience seemed aware that blogs existed but, with the exception of one university professor who herself was a blogger, they had little idea how to go about setting one up. The solution: create a blog right there and then, using Blogger. Named on a whim by an audience member, and still boasting the single post written to demonstrate the facility of the interface, Virtual Drumming was up and running in three or four minutes. Georgia spoke in some detail about Internet audio and the use of RSS feeds, and Attillah gave an impassioned presentation on the blog maintained by the Rights Action Group, which is at the forefront of the protest against the development of an aluminium smelter in south Trinidad.

We also discussed, among many other topics, access to the Internet in the Caribbean; the demographics of the Caribbean blogosphere; phenomena like Flickr, Technorati, the Wikipedia, and Google; the possibilities for citizen journalism in the region, and for using blogs as political tools; ways that Caribbean studies scholars can use blogs to share their research with audiences outside the academy; and the relevance of Caribbean blogs as objects of scholarly study. One audience member, a historian, excitedly compared blogs to sources of oral history as media for documenting diverse experiences and points of view. As we wrapped up, we looked at a blog post by Jamaican Geoffrey Philp, written as a virtual contribution to the roundtable, in which he argued that blogging “challenges the elitism that pervades the Caribbean and is a great experiment in the democratization of data”, and suggested that, by making national boundaries and geographical barriers irrelevant, blogging could serve as a means of fostering a sense of transnational Caribbean identity.

In the audience were academics from Trinidad, Jamaica, the United States, Puerto Rico, and the Netherlands, as well as Trinidadian bloggers Jonathan Ali and Tracy Assing of the Caribbean Beat blog. The roundtable was competing with six or seven other CSA events (including a no-doubt sold-out panel called “How to complete your PhD and get tenure”), and the venue was three blocks from the conference headquarters on a blisteringly hot day, which perhaps accounted for the small turnout, but several members of the audience expressed interest in setting up blogs of their own, and we were invited to stage a similar event for staff and students at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies. Most important, we had a lively, fun discussion with an eager and talkative audience, and at least a handful of Caribbean studies scholars left with a clearer idea of the potential value of blogging and other participatory web media to people in the Caribbean.

If a similar project were started today, no doubt it would use the World Wide Web–actually, I'm a little surprised no one's started a blog called Caribbean Voices yet. (Hint?) But, though there is no West Indian literary blog with the scope and reach of, say, the Literary Saloon or The Valve or Blog of a Bookslut, there is a small, vibrant, and growing literary sector in the Caribbean blogosphere.

Start (as one should) with the writers. Canada-based “Caribbean writer of science fiction” Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring; Midnight Robber; The Salt Roads) has been blogging since late 2001, giving her readers updates on her current work in progress and reflecting on the experience of being a black gay woman working in a genre usually associated with white teenage men. Grenada-born sci-fi writer Tobias Buckell (Crystal Rain) also blogs–and his current work in progress, “Sly Mongoose”, takes its name from an old folk song.

As does Florida-based Jamaican writer Geoffrey Philp (Uncle Obadiah and the Alien; Hurricane Centre; Benjamin, My Son), who started his blog only last December, but has already begun a series of birthday “livications” for other Caribbean writers, including Anthony Winkler, Mervyn Morris, and Andrew Salkey. He recently posted “Where I Stand”, the text of a lecture in which he talks about the birth of his literary ambition and the role of the writer in the Caribbean. Fellow Jamaican Colin Channer (co-founder of the Calabash International Literary Festival) used to have a blog on his website–it seems to have disappeared. And maybe Marlon James–whose first novel, John Crow's Devil, was nominated for both a Commonwealth Writers' Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize–will start a “real” blog one of these days–meanwhile, he's been keeping a so-called “plog” over at Amazon.com, where he's been writing about, among other things, Jean Rhys and literacy in Jamaica.

Other Caribbean writers with websites but not blogs include Trini-Bahamian Robert Antoni (Divina Trace; Blessed Is the Fruit; Carnival), Kittitian-British Caryl Phillips (Cambridge; The Final Passage; Dancing in the Dark), and Jamaican Kwame Dawes (Progeny of Air; Midland).

What about blogs devoted to particular writers? Milton Drepaul has a blog about the work of Guyanese writer N.D. Williams (though, as of today, this hasn't been updated in over four months). It includes reviews of Williams's books and some original writing as well. Canada-based J.E. Bratt runs blogs named after the Guyanese writers Martin Carter and Edgar Mittelholzer, as well as a blog named after the venerable Guyanese journal Kyk-Over-Al, though Bratt's blogs for the most part reproduce material from elsewhere, not always of a literary nature, and sometimes, it must be said, with a casual approach to copyright.

Caribbean Beat magazine is not a literary periodical, but it does run frequent profiles of and interviews with major Caribbean writers, and the magazine's blog (to which I contribute) pays close attention to literary matters; recently, this has included posts on the late writer and lecturer Ken Parmasad and a discussion of “the West Indian canon” triggered by a new edition of Martin Carter's poems.

Finally, I must make special mention of Guyana-Gyal, the pseudonymous author of the simply named Guyana blog. “I gon tell you stories, true, true stories. Like me gran'pa and me nanee and cha cha used to do, and they ancestors too. Take half, leave half, cry or laff,” she says. Guyana-Gyal's lyrical musings on everyday life, written in “Creolese” (or “dialect”), often penetrate to the heart of contemporary Guyana–and the contemporary Caribbean–more directly, more deeply, more movingly than tens of thousands of words of commentary and analysis and opinion written by the pundits and the self-appointed experts.

That, after all, is the power of literature, of literary forms; that is why, fifty years after the political events that inspired them, we still read Martin Carter's “Poems of Resistance”; that is why V.S. Naipaul's 1958 novel The Suffrage of Elvira is still the best guide to electoral politics in Trinidad and Tobago. As Ezra Pound said, “Literature is news that stays news”.

[Dear reader: Have I missed any interesting Caribbean literary blogs? Do use the comments to let me know.]