To my great surprise, GSM and GPRS coverage in the populated areas of
Trinidad is very good. Even though T-Mobile reported coverage in those
areas, I still had doubts that it would be usable. I was pleasantly
surprised to have consistently stronger signals in Trinidad than I do in
my home area of Dayton, Ohio.
This allowed the convenient use of my BlackBerry device to send and
receive e-mails, and I had no problems keeping up with business e-mails.
I also chatted with my wife and kids back home by sending instant
messages to their phones throughout the day. It's a really nice way to
soften the hardships of being away from family when traveling on
business. This is something that doesn't get much press, but it's
extremely beneficial.
One problem I ran into was the difficulty of sending documents via
e-mail. A link between my smartphone and laptop, possibly Bluetooth,
would have been nice to solve this issue. Unfortunately, I wasn't
equipped for that. I noticed that some of my students were using GPRS
cards for sending and receiving e-mail directly from their laptops,
though. I'm now thinking of investing in one of those to make traveling
easier.
Because of roaming charges ($3 per minute), my cell phone was very
expensive to use. I'm glad I checked the price before leaving home;
otherwise, I would have had a big surprise on my next phone bill. In
addition, my phone wouldn't ring when other people called me, so I found
it basically useless, except when I needed to reach someone urgently.
This situation certainly provides a good basis for using VOIP to make
telephone calls to reduce costs and improve usability.
When leaving Trinidad, in the departure gates of the international
terminal at the airport, I saw a large banner advertising Wi-Fi service
in the gate area. For me, that was a nice touch after spending time in a
relatively remote place. I could finally synchronize e-mails on my
laptop and send some large documents.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
