 Welcome to the World Radio Communication Conference 2023 WRC 23 here in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where I've got the great pleasure of being joining the studio of Mr Nigel Casimir, who is the Deputy Secretary-General of the Caribbean Telecommunication Union. Nigel, welcome to the studio. Thank you. Thank you very much. Nice to be here. Now, I'd like to ask you why is the World Radio Communication Conference an important event for the Caribbean Telecommunication Union? We are basically here as an organization to support our Caribbean member states, basically to be as successful as possible in the conference. So that's the importance of it to CTU, but to the Caribbean and the member states in general, wireless communications is key to connectivity generally. In the Caribbean, we are also in more recent times trying to drive things like digital transformation and so on. And it involves a lot of mobile type services as well, where we keep becoming more and more dependent on, I would say, the use of mobile communications, wireless communications in general, satellite communications, all the things that are governed by the radio regulations. It's a global communication environment that we are in and the frequencies that are used for this wireless communication have to be globally coordinated. So we are all here, we are all dependent on it, so here we are. Now, the Caribbean has got some quite severe weather at times and I think certainly things like early warning systems and that kind of thing, there must be of great importance to you as well. Indeed, early warning and also response type services as well. So we do a lot of disaster management planning, for example. And part of what the CTU would help our member states do is put in place the enabling environment and the preparatory tools as far as communication is concerned. So very recently we've been pushing and in fact in our work plan for next year, we'll be trying to enhance the number of national emergency telecommunications plans that our member states have. Right now, it's very few of them have that in place. Basically, it's like a handful out of our 20 member states. So that will be one of an important thrust for us going forward. So we have things like Earth observation, for example. We have satellite remote sensing. And then afterwards, say, in a disaster recovery phase, you need to get communications to distressed zones. So terrestrial communications and satellite communications, they're all very important. And that's just in the disaster scenario. But of course, we want to build our economies as well. So we're all basically developing countries. We are driving the use of information and communications technologies. We are trying to digitize our economies. And all of this calls for the use of wireless communications. One last overall aspect I'd like to mention in terms of the Caribbean is that there is an aspiration approved by the heads of government to create a single ICT space. That is to create a zone within the Caribbean of harmonized policies, legislation and regulations associated with ICT. So wireless is a great part of that. Looking at your members, you've got to say in the region of 20 members there, they obviously spread out a large region there. What are some of the challenges and opportunities regarding radio communications? Well, technology moves and we want to move with it and adopt as quickly as possible. But regulations and the pace of regulation doesn't move as fast as the technology does. So in addition to which driving adoption is also a challenge. So we, as regulators, in fact, as policymakers and regulators in the Caribbean, one has to work on the side with the technologists, the people who want to provide the technologies and so on. But one also has to work on the side of the users who have to be prepared and understand and find the appropriate applications for the technology. And the policymakers and regulators have to put in place the environment so that all these things can happen and will come harmoniously together for success. In terms of use of wireless technologies as well, one special project we have with the ITU and one of our, and the regulator, Andrew and Anne Tobago, in fact, is a project we call the Smart Seas Project, where we are seeking to enhance the communications that can be used by our small scale fishers basically for protection of their lives at sea. So right now, most of the fisheries in the Caribbean is done by small scale fishers. They basically have no communications on their small boats and from time to time we find that some of them get lost, their engines break down or whatever. And this project is seeking to identify and basically facilitate the enhancement of communications for them, especially for emergency situations like that. What are some of the key outcomes that you hope will come from this World Radio Communication Conference? Well, coming into the conference, there were some important agenda items related to, for example, IMT, satellite communications, as mentioned. Let's go back over these a little bit. So IMT, IMT 2030, you're looking at 6G or you're looking at IMT 2020 at 5G? I would say still IMT 2020 for the Caribbean. There's a special challenge in the Caribbean with respect to 5G. Our service providers are having, I guess, a greater challenge than in other parts of the world to create the business cases for implementing the 5G services. So that's a challenge for policy makers. So the policy makers now, and in fact the CTU is assisting in this regard in terms of coordinating the work of policy makers to put in place the appropriate incentives for this to happen. So that's one part of it, but we have to keep current with what's developing. So coming into this WRC, we had, for example, how do we use the 6GHz band? We have competition between IMT and the Wi-Fi alliances and so on. That's a particular example. We would like to see that solved in a particular way. IMT, I mentioned, in most of the Caribbean, we have very high penetration rates for mobile. This is an avenue for investment, development of services and so on. So we want to continue to ensure that we have all the spectrum we need to allow mobile to continue to grow. But apart from that, however, we are now being asked by new non-geostationary satellite service companies to allow their services into the Caribbean. And it would help. Most of the Caribbean states are small, so they don't have large and un-served areas. But there are exceptions to the rule in the CTU. Guyana, Suriname, Belize in particular, Jamaica is also large in relatively speaking. And even within the small territories, there are challenges of terrain which would prevent your maybe wired solutions from getting there, even though it's not necessarily a very long distance. So there are pockets where we would need to use wireless communications to get into there. So we want to make sure that the results coming out of the WRC would continue to allow us to use existing and new and emerging technologies to solve our connectivity problems and our economic development problems as well. Thank you very much, Nigel, for sharing these wonderful insights with us and we wish you the very best of the future and hopefully you get the results that you want. And thank you for joining us in the studio today. Thank you very much. Thank you. 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