Stakeholders in the Universal Access Fund’s
programme to build the northern segment of the broadband wide area network
today announced the completion of the installation at 61 sites now powered with
high speed internet supplied by broadband service provider Columbus Business
Solutions (CBS), the business arm of Flow. Schools along the north coast are
connected to Flow’s fibre optic
broadband network which delivers internet access at speeds of up to 100 Mbps. CBS
has provided the infrastructure as part of an agreement with the Universal
Access Fund, signed in August 2011.
A delegation led by the Hon. Phillip Paulwell,
Minister of Science, Technology, Energy and Mining, observed demonstrations of
the practical applications of the broadband technology. The group, which
included Minister of State Julian Robinson, Hugh Cross, Managing Director of Universal
Access Fund, Michele English, president and chief operating officer of Flow and
Avrill Crawford, Chief Executive Officer of e-Learning Jamaica, observed
students and teachers using the technology to receive and deliver instruction
as part of the e-Learning Jamaica Project.
“Today is a tremendous occasion. The deployment of broadband technology
into the schools represents the ability of the institutions to have full
connectivity, to be fully a part of our e-learning project. This is an internet
based facility that allows for the sharing of
materials, and new approaches to teaching in the classroom, as well as
access to a wealth of information to the teachers and of course to the
students,” said Minister Paulwell commenting on the significance of the
occasion. “This partnership with Flow is quite important as it represents a
paradigm shift in the way our institutions are delivering education. This will
make them far more efficient, its going to make the process of teaching and
learning a lot more seamless and it will encourage our young people to remain
in the classroom and to achieve a lot more.”
Students at the connected schools will be able to access the e-learning
data bank hosted on servers, review pre-recorded lectures and take on-line
examinations, at their leisure, while teachers will benefit from technologies
such as video-conferencing and virtual training sessions –
simultaneously. CBS’s 100 Mbps broadband facility will enable faster
downloads of streaming videos, images and large data files which is necessary
to support the content delivery of e-Learning projects.
Flow and Columbus Business Solutions’ president, Michele English, expressed
satisfaction with the developments stating that the broadband company is
committed to providing the infrastructure to improve the access to technology
needed to thrust education in Jamaica forward. “We are fully committed to the
social and economic development of Jamaica and focused on supporting education
any way we can, so that everyone has an equal opportunity to become future
leaders.”
Speaking to the
impact of the technology out education outcomes, Hugh Cross Managing Director
of the Universal Access Fund said, “Broadband technology will facilitate the
improvement in the learning and teaching experience. It will inspire interest
by the students and ultimately will allow them to perform better at
examinations. We will ultimately have much better results, better educated
students and we will be moving towards a knowledge based society.”
The Universal Access Fund, (UAF), fuelled by a cess charged on overseas
companies for telephone calls terminating in Jamaica, is the main source of
funding for the project aimed at creating an island-wide broadband network providing
public access to the internet through schools, public libraries, post offices
and other agencies.
It was recently announced that the initiative, originally intended to be
implemented in selected secondary schools, libraries and post-offices across
Jamaica, is to be extended to 700 primary schools, following a review of the current programme.
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