Blog from Cisco's Mobility Community, https://www.myciscocommunity.com/community/sp/mobility

1. Service Provider Mobility: WIMAX thrives In
the Caribbean
Posted by Paul Sergeant Jun 24, 2009
I spent most of last week visiting a Cisco WiMAX customer in the Caribbean
island of Curacao. Scarlet BV offers a wireless broadband service in the
Nederland Antilles islands, some of the most southerly islands in the Caribbean
Sea.
Curacao is the biggest of the 4 islands that make up the Nederland Antilles, still owned and
governed by Holland, although with a large degree of autonomy. The population of about
130,000 is made up of 50,000 Dutch, with the rest coming from all over. The island is very
polyglot, with Dutch, English, Spanish and Papiamento (the local language, which is unique
to Curacao) all of the commonly spoken and official languages. This Wikipedia entry has
much more detail about the island, and some great pictures - http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Curacao.
In 2001, the only telecommunications service came from the government owned
telco monopoly, with no broadband. Gaining access to an undersea fiber line,
Scarlet launched a broadband wireless service to offer competitive voice and
data access. Realizing that they needed a non-line-of sight offering to penetrate
the hurricane proof thick walls of Curacao residences, Scarlet converted to a TD-
SCDMA based technology from Navini Networks, since bought by Cisco. The first
site was a 650 foot (200m) tall refinery chimney, now they have nearly island
wide coverage.
In 2009, Scarlet converted their network to Mobile WiMAX (802.16e). Most
of the network was upgraded by a software upgrade, including nearly all the
subscriber units, the few older base stations that couldn’t make the upgrade
were replaced, and re-deployed to start service on St. Maartin. The following is
the link to their website, where you can see their service pricing and marketing -
http://www.scarlet.an/en/.
Plans to expand onto Aruba and Bonaire are well underway. Recently Scarlet
was purchased by an investor group headed by Belgacom, providing access to
capital for additional expansion. Cisco is also an important business partner as
well as radio technology and network services provider. Scarlet now has close
to 5% market share by population on the island, possibly the highest market
penetration of any WiMAX service provider in the world. In fact, they have more
customers than there are households on the island, showing that Mobile WiMAX
offers a “personal broadband” experience, similar to cellular voice service.
Generated by Jive SBS on 2009-12-07-07:00
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2. Service Provider Mobility: WIMAX thrives In the Caribbean
And the Hilton Curacao has great Mango Daiquiris!!
287 Views Tags: wimax, scarlet, curacao
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Generated by Jive SBS on 2009-12-07-07:00
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