INTERVIEW: FLOW JAMAICA
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COMMUNICATIONS Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Stephen Price, Country Manager at Flow Jamaica, about the launch of their new customer-centric bundles, the Flow Foundation, and the company’s contribution to Jamaica’s COVID-19 response. Part of the Liberty Latin America group of companies, and formerly known as Cable & Wireless, Flow is one of the leading telecommunications and entertainment providers in the Caribbean and Latin America. The company has maintained a presence in the region since the 1870s, when it ran the first sub-sea cable connecting Europe with Jamaica’s Holland Bay. Today, Flow boasts over 50,000 kilometers of modern subsea and terrestrial fiber networks, connecting most parts of Latin America. “It’s an award-winning network, and it’s been a phenomenal journey to get to this point,” explains Stephen Price, Country Manager for Flow Jamaica. “We’ve evolved over the years to the first quad play network across the Caribbean, providing mobile services, cable TV subscriptions, broadband, and fixed-voice, right across the entire country.”
STEPHEN PRICE COUNTRY MANAGER AT FLOW JAMAICA
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RAPID DEVELOPMENT Despite Flow’s extensive history, the company is well-aware that it operates within an industry undergoing rapid change. “When
you look back at twenty years ago, we were just talking about 2G,” says Mr. Price. “Now, the conversation has become: ‘When is the 5G evolution coming to the Caribbean?’ The answer is that it may come very soon. In the past three-to-four years, we’ve been building fiber-to-the-home in communities across Jamaica, and we continue to advance every single year, taking daily steps to make sure that we make the latest technologies available to our customers.” As a developing nation, Jamaica offers both advantages and disadvantages for businesses. “You have to understand the strength-of-wallet of the consumer,” explains Mr. Price. “This is a region with currency challenges, with depreciations occurring on an annual basis and low GDP per-capita. On the other hand, it’s no secret that greater access to technology, data, and the internet has helped this country to stabilize the ship and to continue to grow. Access to the internet is key if you want to grow multiple points of GDP, and we now cover almost 96% of the population with LTE service, so that even
