Regulatory body ensures Dominicans stay connected
WITH TELECOMS COMPANIES INVESTING SOME $500 MILLION LAST YEAR, THE FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHT FOR ONE OF THE COUNTRY'S MOST PROMISING SECTORS

A modern, fully-functional telecom infrastructure is anything but a luxury for a developing nation, especially in one where you have a large number of tourists inside the country at any given time and an even larger number of emigrants on the outside, as both tend to want to call home a lot. In the Dominican Republic, the changeover began as far back as 1992, when a pioneering competitor to the long-established state phone monopoly, Codetel, appeared on the scene.
Internet access became available in 1994. But the sector did not really move into high gear until four years later, with the creation of a 21st century policy-making and regulatory body, the Instituto Dominicano de Telecomunicaciones, known universally as Indotel.

ORLANDO JORGE MERA President of Indotel and Secretary of State for Telecommunications

According to its president, Orlando Jorge Mera, in practice Indotel combines the regulatory functions of a communications ministry (rather like the FCC in Washington) with that of a consumer protection bureau, which last year accepted and helped resolve over 600 complaints from the public at large. “One of the five seats on our board is reserved for a director whose brief is to represent the best interests of users and consumers,” he says. “Other directors defend the telecom business sector’s viewpoint, and others represent the government’s Planning Ministry, so this allows us to achieve a significant balance in the administrative tasks we carry out.”
Their overriding interest is in seeing that all the Dominican people get their fair share of benefits from telecom services, ensuring that even the most remote and unprofitable areas are guaranteed basic telephone access, as well as specialized services that serve the greater public interest. “Here’s an example,” says Mr. Mera. “We’ve just created a tele-medicine network that allow 63 state hospitals and 255 rural clinics to hook up via real-time radio links, video-conferencing and Internet access. There’s never been anything like it.”

Indotel’s regulatory functions include ensuring untrammeled interconnection at affordable rates among the various operators, as well as spectrum allocation and management to ensure that the rules of the game are reasonably drawn up and applied with fairness to the big telecom operators, and radio and television broadcasters that operate or would like to operate in the country.
“We believe in the principle that the least possible regulation is always preferable and best for all concerned,” says Mr. Mera. That is an attitude that evidently has gone down well with the companies who last year invested $500 million into the telecom sector, up by 21% over the figure for 2000. “We feel this figure can be equaled or bettered in 2002. But that would be a matter for the competition to decide among themselves.”

At the present time there are four major telecom operators active in the country. Codetel is now owned by the U.S. firm Verizon. Then there is Tricom, controlled and partly owned by local banking interests, France Telecom’s Orange affiliate, and Centennial, a U.S. brand that is an offshoot of All-America Cable & Radio. In fact, the Dominican Republic was the first country in all of Latin America to introduce a mobile phone network in 1987, when it was still an expensive novelty in much of Europe.
By last year, the number of users of analog and digital mobile phones and beepers had surpassed fixed-line telephony customers, by around one million. In addition, several major firms have set up their Central American call center operations in the Dominican Republic, and a number of Internet service providers have their applications for operating licenses now being processed.

The important thing, notes Mr. Mera, is that when communications are working well, people have confidence in their government. “We are grooming ourselves for the role we’ll be playing ten years from now as our country adapts to the new infrastructures and new technologies that are undergoing a continuous process of change. By the end of 2006, all our radio and television networks will have been digitalized.”
Indotel has already started working with the national power utility on developing a fiber optic network that will eventually carry voice, data and imagery into any home that has been wired for electricity. It is also studying the technology involved in setting up an enabling environment for the e-commerce of the future, while at the same time trying to outline a regulatory framework that will hold up over the next decade. As Mr. Mera explains, “with every passing day, it is clear that access to telecommunications has ceased to be a privilege and become a right that everyone is entitled to enjoy.”