Today’s essay is a slightly longer one, it’ll take a couple more minutes to read than is custom for my essays. The subject is broad and couldn’t be condensed without losing some of the finer details. I hope you don’t mind.

This essay is based on a small presentation I did to talk about COVID-19 and how we could kickstart after the worst of the pandemic is over. This essay expands on the first part of that presentation exploring the themes in more detail. Look out for the second part in the near future.

Enjoy! Your feedback is welcome.

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The digital Caribbean

I’ve written here several times about the state of digital in the Caribbean, and I encourage you to read those earlier essays, you can find them all in the archives.

However, what I didn’t emphasise is just how connected we all are in the Caribbean, but only connected in ways that are mostly ephemeral. Out of the nearly forty-four million people in the Caribbean around 77%, that’s thirty-three and half million people are connected with a data-capable mobile phone. More than 26 million people connect to the internet using a computer. But critically, over 50% of us regularly use social networks, a percentage that is higher than most places in the entire world.

Which begs the question, why are our services, our stores and our governments not online?

It would appear that COVID-19 might be the impetus that finally changes that, and I think that we have more chance that this will change because of this pandemic rather than an earthquake or even a hurricane. I feel that we are in a big, forced experiment where the entire world is collectively conscious at the same time and that we all have some amount of control on our outcomes, which is entirely different from a natural disaster that a) we have virtually no control over our outcomes, and b) nothing works during the disaster event.

If you look at the islands in the North Leewards that suffered greatly in the 2017 hurricane season with Irma and Maria, and the Bahamas during last years’ terrifying and unimaginably tragic passing of hurricane Dorian, all islands affected suffered a complete breakdown of most if not all services, digital services included. With COVID-19 there has been virtually zero downtime and zero outages. Sure, many people could not work when their jobs were centred around physically being at work, but those who could work albeit remotely continued with relatively little effort —if we ignore Zoom fatigue that is— which is a real thing.

To answer the above question, I’m noticing more and more services coming online, like the recently announced online Immigration and Customs Form for travelling to Barbados. It’s great to see this move but it provokes the question about why it took so long. The real answer, of course, is the will or lack thereof. There are virtually no technical reasons in 2020 to not have most services online, it was even possible ten years ago. And even those services that cannot be completed fully online, a major component can be digitised to make processes easier.

Quite often, in the companies I consult for, I see multi-step manual processes in use, despite the company being willing to digitise its processes, for example, A ➔ B ➔ C. These processes cling on in manual form often because process A cannot be easily or successfully digitised despite B and C being eligible. The result is the abandonment of the digital process change. There are, of course, at least two ways to go about this. One is to digitise processes B and C, with process A being manually entered into the system for B and C to run the data. Or, as I tend to analyse, why not re-think the process from start to finish seeing if there is a way to digitise not only B and C but a part of A. It looks like this; A1 (manual) ➔ A2 (digital) ➔ B ➔ C. Going a step further the process can then be redesigned, considering the desire to eliminate manual processes; X ➔ Y ➔ Z, for example. XY&Z achieves the same goals but the data entry and data processing are reorganised to eliminate as much manual entry as possible. In this case, this new process no longer resembles the original process. I’m simplifying the work of course, but you get the picture.

 The digital reality

We’re living in a new “digital reality” and approaching an inflexion point where the majority of our lives will be online and those that fail to embrace and effect change will feel pain in many areas of their society. Which is why these first steps cannot come soon enough and why politicians and businesses need to start to radically change their minds to adapt to what is coming, not what is current.

So, how do we achieve this?

The first thing to understand is the current state of affairs, my writing on the current state of digital in the Caribbean goes some way towards this, but further research is needed to look further into the economic, socio-political and business world in the region. Again, I’m doing some of this and intend to do even more going forward, but funding is needed for this to be more widespread.

A few examples of my research can be briefly summarised here in five important categories; discovery, purchasing, payments, aggregation/uberisation and automation. Let’s take a quick peek at each of those in turn.

Discovery

In a world of virtually infinite information, content generation and a never-ending avalanche of information flow, we can extrapolate that the chances of information types we want do not exist are virtually zero, in other words, the information is there somewhere. The issue is in finding that information. This is initially where Google stepped in. Google understood that the exponential growth of websites on the internet would render the old model of listings and directories useless at best and dissuasive at worst. Google’s trick was to ignore the direct listings of names and URLs and concentrate on understanding the relationships between all online sites. PageRank was designed around this principle and was implemented to provide more “relevant” results to people’s searches. Up to that point, the internet had logically reproduced the physical Yellow Pages world.

As a result, a whole new industry was born around getting better visibility for businesses on the internet, it’s called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short. A name born in the generation when Search was the primary tool used online. This name is already becoming redundant as the “optimisation” is not restricted to search engines, but relevant to all online platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc., which run their own in-house developed algorithms of their users’ content.

Purchasing

Purchasing habits were being fundamentally altered even before COVID-19 hit. Today’s purchasing can be easily resumed as a few words :

Buy online. Pick-up in-store.

According to qudini, a specialist SaaS Retail Experience company, in a recent survey, 76% of respondents said they had purchased items using in-store pickup after researching and evaluating online. This is only part of the story, as the online retail giants like Amazon are putting greater effort into reducing friction at the point of sale enabling easier and faster consumption. And, despite this, there is still room for the niche markets to be highly profitable businesses, simply because of the sheer scale of the internet. A niche on the internet is a misnomer.

Payments

There is an ongoing trend of mass democratisation emerging in the financial world. Banking is being disrupted, with online-only banks not only reducing friction to access your money but providing more timely services for a fraction of the cost of traditional banks. And as nothing exists in a vacuum, traditional banks are not ignoring this and are implementing new strategies to ensure survival, for example, pivoting some sectors as online banks using a different brand. Consolidation in the back end additionally helps capitalise on the opportunity to become the guarantor for the online banks.

Payments are being simplified and increasingly more integrated with online platforms from everything from membership systems to complete online marketplaces. Stripe is probably the most known and capable in this industry. However, more and more banks are starting to roll out their own online payments solutions. Not willing to let Stripe eat their lunch so easily they are hoping on keeping their clients in-house. They’ll need to be careful of hidden fees, simplicity and friction reduction to do this… something the banks have shown they are not very good at up until now.

Investing is also opening up and becoming easier for the public. Efforts like Betterment and Wealthfront are only the first step of a wholesale dismantling of the staid and exclusive boys clubs that are current investment bankers. Not only that, as we’ll see later, but their use of technology is also outperforming traditional investment experts:

Betterment portfolios outperformed average advised portfolios 88% of the time.

Aggregation and Uberisation

Aggregation is largely an internet phenomenon. It’s an extension of a well-trodden path from the powerful retailers using their muscle to keep clients coming back, thereby using that power to entice suppliers to prioritise their stores (being that the stores can guarantee customers), rinse and repeat. The traditional giant stores like Macy’s and Debenhams rode this wave for several decades. With digital distribution being essentially free, the value chain has been turned upside down meaning that those who integrate throughout the value chain and commoditise their supply generally increase their profit over the incumbents.

The uberisation of services is another trend that appears unstoppable for now. Uberisation facilitates a peer-to-peer driven business model enabled through the use of technology to simplify the on-demand delivery of physical goods and services. The growing use of mobile and the constant connection to the internet allowed Uber to deliver an application that works for both drivers and passengers, hooking them up without the need for a central taxi operator to get involved. The model has been further developed and exploited by food delivery services, interestingly Uber has just acquired Postmates on the back of a decreasing amount of mobility and an increasing amount of online ordering. It doesn’t take a giant leap to see how this could become a deliver-anything service.

Automation

Automation, more specifically Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are the last key element. Their democratisation by the Microsofts of the world (see Azure Cognitive Services), is allowing a completely new generation of software designs. Simple operations like the scanning and treatment of receipts direct-to-accounting software are freeing up administrative staff to be better used in more valuable roles. Even simple workflow systems like Microsoft Power Automate can tap directly into the APIs of these services and perform simple repetitive tasks as an aid to decision-making.

Which brings me to the availability of online automation products, of which IFTTT was probably the first to hit notoriety. If This Then That simplified the creation of fun automation that switched on your lights as you neared home or flashed the lights in the colours of your favourite team when they scored. It went even further by hooking into popular SaaS products allowing you to “join” together previously disparate systems. Zapier and Power Automate take this much further, with examples of users replacing no-longer-supported legacy software with modern workflows that are modulable and allow for data analysis, unlike the systems they replace.

The second step is to try to envisage what the future will bring. Easier said than done, but current affairs do give us a few hints at what the future may hold for the internet and business on the internet. In my research three factors come up time and time again. Regulation, health and information misuse.

Regulation

I like memes so I couldn’t resist:

The EU has restarted efforts on its Digital Services Act, a far-reaching proposal to regulate Artificial Intelligence and data collection. Even the traditionally Wild West US is hauling its biggest tech CEOs to testify before Congress in an investigation to determine if the AAAF (i.e., Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook) are using anti-competitive practices (they are). We can expect the end to the free-for-all that is the current posture in most countries. Regulation will affect not only the giants online but all the supporting systems and smaller operations. GDPR was only a first attempt but its implementation has given impetus for the next wave of regulation, one that will bite harder, there is no question.

Regulation will not just stop at competition and data harvesting, but it will also start to regulate what information can and cannot be published on the internet, much like how traditional media cannot publish absolutely anything. The days of self-regulation are soon over, as, just like the banks, the internet is incapable of regulating itself effectively. Regulation will be very difficult and full of competing ideologies pulling against each other. Just how we are going to shoehorn a global internet into the current state of political divisions around the world is still open to question for the moment. I suspect the EU will move first, and any businesses that are in some way reliant on the EU will feel the early pain, including us here in the Caribbean.

Health

When I discuss health, I’m talking about what is increasingly a difficult subject for parents and concerned parties like schools and businesses, that of Digital Health. Often reduced —incorrectly in my view to screen time— digital health will become a subject that every employer and supplier has to be cognizant of. They will be forced to take it into account when developing systems and processes to prevent people from being adversely affected.

Employers will have to better discern good screen time from bad, to ensure their employees are not overly exposed to bad screen time. But what is bad screen time? How do we define it? How do we measure it effectively? How do we control it? These and many other questions are starting to be debated the world over. Like regulation, it is only a matter of time before it becomes a central aspect of your digitalisation strategy.

Information misuse

The most prominent danger for those of us who spend most of our working and personal lives online is fake news. A phrase the short-fingered vulgarian in the White House likes to overuse when attacking his imagined foes. But fake news is absolutely real, and ironically often created and perpetuated by the likes of Mr Drumpf. It is the fact that it is easy to produce and distribute, making it such a danger to the world and contributes to making it difficult to regulate.

Another problematic innovation we’re seein g in currently limited use is that of deepfakes. They’re not completely indistinguishable to real photos, film or audio. But they are getting better, and with the use of machine learning their efficacy is accelerating. Legislation and regulation have not and likely will not catch up with these developments any time soon. It’s a disaster waiting to happen if it hasn’t already, and we just haven’t noticed it yet.

Interesting times

In summary, we can see that digital integration of business is evolving and accelerating, in part due to the current pandemic, and in part because of the natural changes in a society that is more exposed to digital than previously. Customers in the Caribbean are becoming more digital, although not for the reasons we thought they would —convenience and availability— but for reasons more to do with safety in the face of a virus we still know little about. We see business and structural changes brought about by investment or governmental and organisational willingness to face one of the most damaging crises we've seen to date.

We also see that the very nature of the internet is about to change and change significantly. With more and more governments and populations favouring some form of regulation, it is only a matter of time before whole sections of the internet come under some framework of operations that have previously been rejected. Media, social media and sales of goods and services are likely the first areas regulated, but make no mistake regulation will follow for everything else soon after. The fact that the internet provides a scale of possibilities hitherto unseen, logically means that regulation will affect on a mass scale too.

Even without the pandemic, we were living in interesting times. Adding COVID-19 to the mix has been like pouring water into a boiling chip pan. Hold on tight.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I’d really appreciate it if you would share it to those in your network.

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As many of you will know, I live in the Caribbean. And apart from its idyllic setting sometimes, we do have 3 major potential natural disasters to cope with; Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Hurricanes.

The 1st of June debuts the Atlantic Hurricane Season, which lasts until the end of November. The early part of the season is relatively quiet for us in the Caribbean as most storm-potential depressions tend to form in the Gulf of Mexico, way past our islands. Their movement tends to be NE, threatening Cuba, and Florida mostly. That’s not a perfect explanation, but you get the idea.

Further on in the season the Cape Verde tropical waves begin to get more and more active. Caribbean Hurricanes are Cape Verde hurricanes, and take their name from the waves that come off the coast of Africa, head west and using the earth’s rotation spin up to become hurricanes.

Today is the 7th July, and we’re currently under a tropical wave that is producing a little thunder and rain. It’s a wake up call to all us here in the Caribbean that the season is now underway. Now is the time to start planning and preparing. Every Island has advice on what to do, how to do it. Take that advice. It’s free.

From a rainy and thundery Windward Islands.

7 July 2020 — French West Indies

From Fast Company’s interview with Scott Galloway:

Fast Company: What do you think about Mark Zuckerberg’s relationship with Donald Trump?

Scott Galloway: Everyone kind of figured out that Mark Zuckerberg is the biggest oligarch in the history of mankind, and that he is leveraging his proximity to power in corrupt ways just to increase his wealth. And I think the Trump-Zuckerberg story is going to have a big impact on the way political speech happens on social networks.

These companies constantly prostitute the notion of the First Amendment. And whenever they say First Amendment, what they really mean is they want to pretend that they shouldn’t be the arbiters of truth, such that they can let their supernova business models run unfettered. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment. They are private companies; they are not obligated to the First Amendment. There is nothing in any of their backgrounds that shows any reverence or respect for free speech.

I’m still of the opinion that to work for Facebook is to put your morals “on hold”. Read the whole article to get a better picture.

5 July 2020 — French West Indies

I wrote in one of my recent newsletters that I had started to form a bigger picture of the events that are happening around the world currently. I thought I’d have a crack at trying to articulate this feeling. It’s not very positive as I don’t feel the future is that positive in the short-to-medium term. Long-term, I think things will right themselves after a wave of unrest and a reset as we all collectively wake up. Then the cycle will start over again.

Here’s a timeline of the events that started me down this track. For the record, I know other events happened earlier than this timeline, which I why I say the events that started me down this.

Brexit: The collective undoing of a stable —although not by any means perfect— relationship with Europe is, in my mind, a short-sighted and ultimately destructive path for the UK. Both sides will lose out, but I think my native UK will come out worse. But to be honest, that doesn’t really matter, as the UK will find a way to be OK. What really worries me is how this plays into the next step on this timeline?

Political and social division: If anything, this is one of the core parts to creating the necessary climate to feed and grow Brexit. Europe is the big monster to blame for all ills, while in front of our faces political and social groups are profiting from the division in society. Take the US as an example of extremes. There seems to be no middle ground any more. It wasn’t like this before, and it doesn’t have to be this way, but society is walking blindly into the guet-apens.

Social media: I'll not blame anyone social media firm in particular because, in reality, they are all willing participants in a destabilising social experiment. They just haven’t admitted it yet. The cognitive dissonance for me and others is that these platforms do lots of good and being digital hence agnostic, they simultaneously do lots of harm. Does the good outweigh the harm? I don’t think so currently.

Covid-19: It couldn’t have come at a better time to anchor and entrench people in their bubbles. Not only did lockdown give many people a lot more time to go down their own rabbit holes even further, but the fact that the virus exists gave some the power to develop or extend existing conspiracies to an extent never seen before. We’ve seen burins of cell towers, potentially putting people’s lives at risk, large protests against mask-wearing and the whole situation was just manna for QAnon.

Civil war: I think the next logical step in this increasingly divided state of affairs is nothing short of civil war. After Brexit, I was convinced that Europe would be first to spill into civil war, and I’m not fully convinced yet it won’t. Legitimising nationalism (which is what essentially Brexit is) I felt, was to legitimise nationalism in Europe, ergo civil war in Europe. However, the recent instability in the US has got me thinking that there is a real risk of the US tipping into civil war before Europe. The US is on a collision course with itself like it has not been since 1861.

World war: If either Europe or the US bascule into civil war, it is only a matter of time for the other to do the same. We’re too intrinsically linked on a social level not to follow suit. We know that will only lead to world war, and we know this to be so, just look at the central purpose of the European Union:

The precursor to the European Union was established after World War II in the late 1940s in an effort to unite the countries of Europe and end the period of wars between neighboring countries.

This extract is from this article at ThoughtCo.

There is a ray of hope, however. The #BlackLivesMatter movement offers us a glimpse into a better future. One where we are conscient and empathic to one and other. According to some figures, 62% of the US population agrees with the movement, with 76% of those surveyed in a Monmouth University poll stating that racism and discrimination is a “big problem”.

I fear for the future, as I’m predisposed to do so, but I’m hopeful that I’m wrong. Thank you for reading. Please get in touch through Twitter @virek.

4 July 2020 — French West Indies

Hello from a severe Saharan-dust-cloud-covered-Caribbean. A once-in-a-50-year event according to The Guardian.

COVID-19 has accelerated the use of digital throughout the world, the question is, is the Caribbean ready for the change and made the recent difficulties at Digicel a cause for concern?

Before getting into this week’s essay, I wanted to let you know that I got some pushback from my last article dealing with online and virtual conferences. I thoroughly appreciated the discussion I had, and I got some more exposure to other solutions to some of the problems I highlighted. Taking that a little further, I did some more in-depth research and found this graphic that highlights all the solutions surrounding digital conferencing. There’s a lot there, wow! The main point of the feedback was that I said that there weren’t solutions to the problems I mentioned. I was —sort of— wrong. There are lots of solutions as the graphic shows. But one thing that they all fail on is massive scale. I should have been more explicit in my essay, explaining that I was targetting large-scale conferences, conferences that typically have tens of thousands of visitors over a few days. None of these solutions scale to that level sadly. Let me know if I’m wrong again, I’d love to hear from you. 😀

Is the death of Digicel greatly exaggerated?

There's been a lot of ink spilt recently on the death of Digicel in the Caribbean. To paraphrase and to misquote simultaneously… the reports of Digicel's demise are greatly exaggerated.

Here's why.

To understand what is happening, it is essential to understand not only the history but the current context. If we look at it in detail, two aspects need to be taken into consideration; the offer and the usage. It is here we see the first signs of a strategy that is no longer in line or adapted to the current market and the emergence of a strategy targeted to the way we use mobile phones today.

The Context - Digital in the Caribbean

In the last several years, it is clear that three things have become increasingly important and more frequently used than at any other time in history; digital technologies, mobile and social media. With a global population of 7.7 billion, we now see more than 4.5 billion people use the internet. Social media boasts 3.8 billion users, essentially making around half of the planet using some form of social media. The COVID-19 pandemic has done nothing to stem that growth, if anything it has likely increased usage and signed up many more users that would have eventually got on board.

Interestingly, of all internet usage, mobile data usage will top 50% for the first time this year 2020, with the average time spent on the internet of 6 hours and 43 minutes. Basically a full workday is spent on the internet, either for business or pleasure, most likely a mixture of both. Of that time, users around the world spend on average 2 hours and 24 minutes on Social Media. Growing categories such as Ride-Hailing, Digital Marketing and Online Shopping are all being affected by the growth in access to data on-the-go. 

I previously wrote a brief piece about digital in the Caribbean, so it is pertinent to revisit this with the latest statistics I could research. As with the original essay, all data is from wearesocial unless specified otherwise.

Starting with literacy, which is table stakes when it comes to using digital technologies like computers and mobile phones, sadly, the Caribbean still has much work to get the population above 90% literacy in the region. Looking at the general breakdown, women’s literacy rates are 88% with men’s only slightly above at 89%. To look at this the other way around, over a tenth of the population are unable to read and write by the age of 15. How are they going to buy food online or use other digital services?

Internet penetration (the number of internet-connected people compared to the total population) is again, sadly, lagging even our closest neighbours. With 60% penetration in the Caribbean compared to Brazil’s 72%, or Central America’s 66%, that translates to roughly 17 million people in the region still unconnected. But it’s not all bad news, as growth in internet-connected users is a healthy 8.5%. Meaning that 100% connectivity is still more than a decade away, but it’s moving the right direction. If the COVID-induced recession is not as damaging as feared, I suspect that growth will accelerate. 

Devices are an important part of getting online and globally, only 3.3% of users have “feature phones” (yes they are still on sale in the region) that get internet connectivity, compared to 91% of smartphone users. The only reason to get a smartphone is to use the internet. This is corroborated by the fact that 53.3% of all web traffic is from mobile phones, an increase of 8.6% globally, at the expense of traffic from fixed devices like PCs and laptops, tablet devices and consoles, all reducing in usage; -6.8%, -27% and -30% respectively. Mobile connectivity as a percentage of the total population is currently 77% in the Caribbean. As a comparison, most of the “developed” nations run at over 100%. However, the distribution in our region is less than even. Antigua and Barbuda is third in the global table with mobile connectivity at 195%, just behind the USVI at 198%. The French West Indies (Guadeloupe, Guyane and Martinique) are at an average of 138%. All this drives an average of 7.2 GB of data per month, per mobile connection in the world, with Latin America and the Caribbean running at half of that, i.e. 3.6 GB.

Social media usage in the Caribbean runs at around 51% of the total population, an increase of 11% since 2019. Some of our islands make it to the top ten list, with Aruba and Cayman Islands coming in 6th and 7th with social media penetration rates of 90% and 89% respectively. Looking further into the data, eligible users are defined as children 13 years and older, which puts the Caribbean above Europe in the use of social media, 64% compared to 62%. Incidentally, Aruba tops the chart when it comes to Facebook eligible audience numbers, a full 96% of 13+-year-olds are available on Facebook. We’ve never been more connected.

What are we all doing online? Well, according to the data, 90% of users watch online video content, 70% are streaming music, and 47% and 41% listen to online radio stations and podcasts respectively. Mostly, entertainment services make up the bulk of internet usage, goodbye traditional TV and Radio seems to be the order of the day. Looking at the apps currently used, it is chat (mostly WhatsApp), social networks (Facebook), video apps (YouTube), shopping and (Google) maps, when looking at global usage. Unsurprisingly, social media makes up the lion’s share of that usage; in fact, a full 50% of the 3h40 minutes is attributed to social media. This usage is also corroborated by the top three most visited websites (globally); Google, YouTube and Facebook coming in third place. Interestingly, and something I’ve noticed for quite a while, the younger generation, Gen Z, are the least interested in Facebook, with only 3.1% of males and 2.5% of females on the site, only the over-65s have less presence!

The History - The offer in the Caribbean

If we ignore the smaller players that are primarily localised to a specific market like the Dominican Republic or the US Virgin Islands and Porto Rico, there are two leading operators, Digicel and Flow. Flow is the incumbent and has been in the region in one form or another since the early twentieth century, as this map of the Eastern Telegraph Companies network shows. Digicel is a newer entrant, but by no means unique to the region. Digicel launched in 2001 in Jamaica and has quickly spread across the region and into other overseas territories in the Pacific Islands region in 2006.

Source: Wikipedia

Both operators are well implanted and serve the wider Caribbean with mobile phone, data and other services such as broadband and television. Digicel has recently got into the mobile money transfer business with Digicel Mobile Money launched in Fiji in 2010 and is looking to expand around their markets.

Without taking on exhaustive research to compare offers, services and pricing (which is incidentally about as transparent as mud), it is difficult to get a detailed picture across the region. Complications such as currencies and fluctuations in exchange rates only further obfuscate value comparisons. Suffice to say though, that if you live on an island that has a small population you are likely to get less for your money! Broadband pricing ranges from an average of 25 USD per month for a broadband fixed-line connection in Saint Martin (French side) to an average 179 USD per month in the British Virgin Islands, that’s according to cable.co.uk, a firm dedicated to researching broadband pricing globally.

But that’s not the real issue, as far as I can tell, most offers are geared toward the old-reality of the internet. That is to say that once upon a time we were entertained by television and would communicate with friends and family using a phone. The current offers are squarely aimed at that, with classic triple-play deals; TV, telephone and (limited) internet. Note that the internet is last on the list!

The Future - The way we’ll all be using the internet

Source: Apple

Habits on the fundamental way we’re consuming entertainment are changing concurrently with the way we are communicating. As more and more streaming opportunities coming online, people have got used to watching what they like, when they want, not when a TV station dictates. There’s no surprise of the rise of Netflix and the up and coming services like HBO Go, Disney+ and Apple’s own attempt, Apple TV+. In this reality, content is king, and the internet providers are reduced to simple data pipes, shipping IP bits backwards and forwards at the demand of both the customer and the content creator/owner or platform. Their bread and butter is being commoditised and the value being sucked out. A reality that they are undoubtedly very uncomfortable with, which is why the triple-play is still so prevalent as it ties the user into one service where profits and losses can be spread. When evaluating the worth of one supplier over the other, I’m sure you’re no longer interested in call quality over a landline, you Skype, you FaceTime or WhatsApp with better voice quality than many operators can supply using POTS. 

However, what the new generation wants is entertainment, social networking and ephemeral communications. In other words, what they want is data. Data is the backbone that supplies them with YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and all the other services that are so far outside the purview of traditional media, and it is mobile! Looking at mobile data costs, the French West Indies comes out on top with average GB pricing lower than the rest of the Caribbean with prices at around $2.5 US, compared to $23 US for the Cayman Islands. More and more is being done on mobile, whether it is in the home or on the go. The mobile phone or tablet device is the item on which people are being entertained, checking the bank balance, buying stuff and communicating. Fixed broadband is being deprecated by people’s real-world use.

But here’s the point, unlike the other operators, Digicel’s Wizzee brand in the French West Indies has done something different, and it is that something that is probably going to be part of the future of mobile operators. Currently, mobile subscriptions in the Caribbean are either data limited or so expensive as to radically limit the amount of data used (see above). With the world moving to more data-only services, music, television, video conferencing/chats (thanks COVID), and even plain old voice calling replaced with FaceTime voice or WhatsApp calls, networks are going to have to rethink their inadequate data allowances to evolve and allow their traditional cash cows to starve. As the state of digital in the Caribbean above shows, how services are being consumed is fundamentally shifting. Bits are taking over, and the younger generation are only going to get hungrier for more bits and more mobility, eschewing satellite, cable and other essential services.

Digicel’s Wizzee is the first attempt, and a pretty good one at that, of moving to a data-only world. 50 GB per month for €10 clearly emphasises data. When you look at the offer, you pretty much don’t care how many minutes or SMSs you get (does anyone still use them?). Wizzee is essentially a data offer with voice and SMS thrown in for free. As GenZ gets older, and a newer even more data-hungry generation comes along, the pressure to provide data-only services is going to grow, not diminish. 

COVID-19 has given us all a glimpse into the future of data communications, and some would say communications period, and it is that world that operators need to start to pivot their offers towards. For what it’s worth, I think that the Digicel brand in the French West Indies will disappear with Wizzee disrupting its parent. It will continue steadfast in the rest of the Caribbean but will need to pivot to primarily data-first services to survive.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I’d really appreciate if you would share it to those in your network.

Share The Future is Digital

If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you on board. You can sign up here:

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Visit the website to read all the archives.

Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.