Out With the Old in With the New: ECTEL Stages Successful Launch of its Electronic Communications Bill Education and Public Awareness Campaign
Friday, February 4, 2022
by Eastern Caribbean Telecommunications Authority (ECTEL)
There was much excitement as the Eastern Caribbean Telecommunications Authority (ECTEL) virtually launched its Electronic Communications (EC) Bill Education and Public Awareness Campaign on Thursday, January 27th.

The participants who joined via Zoom and Facebook were enlightened about the EC Bill and its multitude of benefits to consumers in our five member states of the Commonwealth of Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. 

In his Opening Remarks delivered under the theme Bridging the Broadband Usage Gap, Senior Minister and Minister for Infrastructure, Ports, Transport, Physical Development and Urban Renewal (Saint Lucia) and Chairman of ECTEL’s Council of Ministers, Honourable Stephenson King and said:

“Quality of service on both fixed and mobile broadband networks has been a challenge across the ECTEL Member States. Under the new regulatory framework, ECTEL will propose updated Quality of Service Regulations. These will replace outdated regulations which are no longer fit for purpose and do not allow the regulator to acquire useful information from service providers to address the numerous complaints from consumers. Updated regulation will allow for the use of new tools for monitoring and measuring the quality of service offered by providers, and importantly, the quality of customer experiences when using broadband and other electronic communications services.”    

Thereafter, the Chairman of the Board of Directors, Mr. Duane Noel (Grenada) spoke about the role of the EC Bill in promoting a robust broadband supply chain in support of the elimination of the broadband usage gap in the Member States. Mr. Noel said:

“The absence of clear infrastructure sharing regulations to allow other operators access to potential bottleneck infrastructure, can frustrate efforts to deliver competitively priced broadband services to consumers.”

He went on to note that the EC Bill encourages and supports investment in robust infrastructure by all service providers and that this is essential to ensure network resilience and redundancy in the electronic communications sector.

The brief yet interactive event was laced with a Questions and Answers session carried out by the Acting Managing Director, Ms. Cheryl Hector Fontenelle and the General Counsel, Ms. Sallyane Cotter as well as two quizzes to test participants’ knowledge of the EC Bill and ECTEL’s work. The winners of the quiz are Ms. Juronel K.R. Smalling and Mr. Bennette Thomas.

Some of the activities unveiled at the launch include the creation and dissemination of infographics on ECTEL’s social media platforms; an EC Bill Social Media Viral Challenge for students; a Spotlight on the EC Bill Competition for Caribbean media practitioners; virtual talks and a popular theatre production on the EC Bill among other activities. The audience was also entertained by Steel pannist, Donavan Edwin throughout the event.

If you missed the launch of the EC Bill Education and Public Awareness Campaign, you may watch it at: https://youtu.be/XC5LbVDGqIY. To learn more about the EC Bill download the document here. Follow us on social media to keep abreast of all upcoming activities - @ectel on Facebook and YouTube and @ectelauthority on Instagram and Twitter.