By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A niche Bahamian telecommunications operator yesterday said it planned to triple staff numbers by 2012 year-end, as it moves to ‘ramp up’ ahead of an expected 25 per cent year-over-year revenue increase in 2013.

Disclosing that $2.5 million had been invested in Jazztell to-date, Leslie Pindling, its managing director, told Tribune Business the company was set to become “a force to be reckoned with” as it exploited the continuing deregulation of the Bahamian communications market.

While establishing Jazztell had been “brutal”, in the face of competition from former monopolies, Cable Bahamas and the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC), Mr Pindling told Tribune Business that the company was targeting several niche growth opportunities in 2013.

He added that these avenues had been opened by regulatory moves to bring certainty to the Bahamian call termination/interconnection landscape, with Jazztell focusing on both domestic and tourist growth opportunities via its wireless Internet and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) products.

Apart from new subdivisions and properties where BTC and Cable Bahamas had only put infrastructure in, and not connected customers, Mr Pindling said Jazztell was already showing what it could do by providing managed wireless services for Dunkin Donuts’ downtown Nassau outlet.

The company was also talking to the Ministry of Education about installing wireless Internet in all government schools, and providing video conferencing and video monitoring services in conjunction with BTC, while other target markets are the cruise ship passengers/crew and boating segments.

And, noting that Jazztell and its six employees had only been operating since Christmas 2009, Mr Pindling said the company’s interconnection agreement with BTC - and the fact the industry was settling down in this area - would enable it to go back into offering home phone and Internet service.

Looking forward to Jazztell’s prospects for 2013, Mr Pindling said of their potential impact: “Our growth potential revenue wise will be 25 per cent of what we’re making now with all the new things coming online.

“Jazztell is going to be a force to be reckoned with. We’ll have to triple out staff, which will be about 20 people by the end of the year. With all this coming on, call volumes will quadruple themselves.

“If we can generate what we think we can, our projection is that by the end of the year we will be terminating two-three million calls per month,” Mr Pindling told Tribune Business.

“Cable Bahamas must be doing 10 times’ that, and BTC doing 50 times’ that, but that’ll be very good for us.

“We’ve got a good market share, and want to grow. I would not consider it to be a percentage. From 2009 to now, what we have grown to acquire from having nothing is pretty good.”

Explaining how its managed wireless services worked, Mr Pindling said it allowed multiple Dunkin Donuts’ customers to go online simultaneously, but their usage was limited to 20 minutes. If customers then wanted another 20 minutes, they had to buy another Dunkin product.

“It’s a revenue generator at the same time,” Mr Pindling said. “It’s well managed and works for them. Their volume is through the roof.”

Other markets successfully entered by Jazztell included providing emergency back-up Internet services for Bahamas-based banks, and Mr Pindling said: “We’re learning as we go.

“We’re not experienced, but are surviving, keeping our heads above water, and we’re happy. 2013 will be very good for Jazztell. We have a lot of new technology coming, which will be good.”

Jazztell and its plans are a prime example of how liberalisation can benefit an industry, and country, prompting the market entry and creation of a host of new operators.

On the Ministry of Education discussions, Mr Pindling said he wanted to ensure public schools kept up with their private counterparts when it came to technology.

Access to grades, school reports, curriculums and even teachers themselves online was being looked at, along with the ability to provide lessons to Family Island schools via videoconferencing - something that could help alleviate teacher shortages.

Disclosing that Jazztell was looking at this product in conjunction with BTC, Mr Pindling told Tribune Business his company was also focusing on the tourist roaming market.

Noting that many visitors shut down their cell phones while in the Bahamas due to high roaming charges, he added: “I would like to see us be a third party user, where people can switch on to the Jazztell network and not be subject to high roaming charges, once that market becomes available.

“We have all of downtown covered by wireless.” Cruise passengers were already using the company’s WiFi Internet product, not wanting to pay $25 per hour on ship, while Jazztell’s offering of $1 per day Internet service to cruise staff had “absolutely exploded”.

And the provider was also seeing its boating business “growing”, offering Internet access on a ‘pay as you go’ basis at $25 per week to visiting boaters at Nassau’s harbourfront marinas and boat moorings.

“We’re putting a lot of things together,” Mr Pindling told Tribune Business. “It’s about cutting costs, making ourselves more competitive and having services that make us different.

“There’s these little initiatives that are keeping us afloat. They are different and new.”