Apace With the Cellular Game

By Marvin A. Hokstam

Ask any experienced visitor to the Caribbean and you'll get the same answer. St. Maarten/St. Martin rules in technological advancement. The island should — its stores sell the latest gadgets at alluring duty-free prices, and service providers make it their business to stay apace with world developments.

For instance, every mobile phone that is available in the United States or Europe is available in the stores that sell electrical appliances; be it cellular phones with cameras, MP3, MP4 or WiFi capacity. As far as the region is concerned, St. Maarten/St. Martin definitely enjoys its position at the top.

The divisions are pretty straightforward. Local telephone service providers TelEm, New Technologies Group, Network IDL and Antillean conglomerate United Telecommunications Services (UTS) compete for a slice of the Internet markets. UTS offers One-Net wireless Internet and NTG offers Caribserve. TelEm, through its Internet subsidiary, offers wireless, dial-up and DSL. Network IDL also offers Megatropic DSL broadband Internet.

East Caribbean Cellular (ECC), TelCell (a subsidiary of TelEm) and UTS provide cellular service, which these days is dominated by GSM phones.

UTS, which rolled out its Blackberry service in 2006, is offering Blackberry phones designed especially for general consumption. The company now offers Blackberry Pearl and Blackberry Curve and is ready to follow through and also bring the Blackberry phones with WiFi and cameras to the market.

UTS was the first on the island to bring the Blackberry service to St. Maarten. "This service enabled mobile use of Microsoft Outlook. Every e-mail that reaches your computer will be accessible wirelessly on your mobile phone. Every appointment your office makes for you will be updated in a mobile synchronization," said Maurice Steenbergen, service market manager.

Calling his company a market leader, he proclaims: "UTS stays ahead of the game." The company will also soon offer GPS auto tracking services, enabling people to trace their car in case it's stolen. "And if someone locks his key inside, he can have the station unlock the vehicle. We should even be able to start a car from our station if a customer wants that. This service should be interesting for people who want to prevent car theft, and for car rental agencies," said Steenbergen.

Roaming with cellular phones is also still possible. Steenbergen advises that visitors manually select the cheapest local provider, as that could save up to 50 percent on a phone bill. "When you arrive in a country and your phone roams, it automatically selects the strongest signal. In St. Maarten/St. Martin you could be roaming on so many different signals of so many different companies, but your phone will select the strongest, which may not always be the cheapest," he explains. Selecting the preferred provider is done by scrolling to "network settings" on the cellular phones. Steenbergen insists that UTS' network offers the cheapest roaming rates; we'll leave that up to the "roamer" to determine.

The company will soon be expanding its Chippieland concept. Chippieland includes the countries within the UTS network—St. Maarten/St. Martin, Saba, St Eustatius, Curaçao, Bonaire, St. Kitts & Nevis and the Netherlands—so any UTS subscriber can call any other subscriber at local St. Maarten/St. Martin rates. "We're including Suriname in Chippieland," Steenbergen announced. Good news for the many natives of the former Dutch colony in South America who now live in St. Maarten/St. Martin.u

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