Barbadian businesses and households will soon be able to access “the fastest Internet speed ever”.
Last week, LIME, the island’s only full service telecommunications provider, officially launched the new one gigabit per second (Gbps) high speed Internet service, which officials said would shortly be available to customers.
It means LIME is the first telecommunications company in the Eastern Caribbean to roll out the service.
One Gbps is equivalent to downloading 100 million characters of text in one second, and it means Internet users are able to stream at least five high definition videos at the same time on one gigabit connection without buffering. This, LIME, added was while still having room to email and surf the web.
“We are the only full service telecommunications provider here in Barbados and what we have done over the years for Barbados is to make sure that whether it’s our fixed lines, our broadband, our mobile and increasingly our entertainment, that we present services and products to our customers to keep them abreast of the latest technologies,” LIME Barbados chief technology information officer Glenn Thorpe said.
“Today our lowest fibre package starts at around 20 megabits per second, which is our superfast speed and our highest speed today which we offer to the public is around 320 megabits per second. So a one gigabit service when compared to the 20 megabits is around 50 times as fast and it’s going to be just over three times as fast in terms of comparing with our 320 megabits.”
“You may ask the question: who needs one gigabit per second in their home or even in their office? A lot of the transactions on the Internet today are around multi-media. We have moved from standard definition to high definition and we are now moving to 4K.So in terms of collaboration especially across the Internet, being able to collaborate in real time and being able to get the level of detail you need when you are collaborating across distances, this type of speed is going to be increasingly required from our customer base,” he added.
LIME said the new service was the result of the successful implementation of its Fibre to the Home project, “which has seen 50 000 homes passed with an additional 25 000 to be completed by next month”. (SC)
