Interview with Kendall Dupersoy, Former CEO, TELEM, Sint Maarten

24 Jun Interview with Kendall Dupersoy, Former CEO, TELEM, Sint Maarten

What would be your summary of your perspectives for the next year and your main goals?

TELEM is a locally owned, full-service telecommunication company. We do mobile, we do fixed, we do TV, we do full rapid international connections; the full gamut. It was established about 25 years ago outside the former Lance Radio, which was owned by the then Antillean government. It became 100 percent owned by the Sint Maarten government or the Sint Maarten people.

In about 2017, I started in this position and there have been a lot of technological changes in the last seven years. Now we are enhancing those changes. Right now we are introducing a new mobile system and a new internet core. This means that the system that connects all households by internet is going to be completely new by the end of this year. We’re going to have a new mobile system by the last quarter of 2025. We are also doing a lot of automation and AI internally, within the organization itself, to provide better service to our customers.

Recently, a cable was installed between Sint Maarten and Puerto Rico, which promises to provide 5G coverage very soon. Could you tell us more about this?

The cable and the 5G are actually two different things. The cable was broken in 2016 and we finally got it repaired this year. It is now up and running and allows us to bring more bandwidth and more internet to Sint Maarten at a lower cost so we can give people better internet at the same price that they’re paying right now. The 5G solution is also something that we’re implementing next year. Now we’re busy with Bureau Telecommunications and Post and to get the frequencies that we need to provide 5G. Initially we’re going to start in tourist areas like Phillipsburg Simpson Bay, but by the end of next year we should have island-wide 5G coverage.

One of the things that we did after the hurricane was we spent a lot of money making sure that our sites and our locations were very resilient, with full concrete and smaller windows. This helped us to recover very quickly and prepared us in case we are hit by a hurricane again. In 2017, 85 percent of the island was up and running in about two days after the hurricane. If we get hit with a similar hurricane in future, we aim to be up and running in less than 24 hours.

A lot of our cables reach households through underground cables, so they were not affected by the hurricane. Our central offices are now bunkers, fully made of concrete. We have a lot of backup systems in place. So we are confident that within 12 to 24 hours of being hit by a storm, we will be able to provide connectivity to Sint Maarten’s people.

Travelers today rely more on their phones to research before a trip, often reading user-generated content from influencers for example. How are you adapting content and promotions for today’s traveler and making sure that they get the data that they need?

They will definitely get the data they need, but from a content perspective, we don’t really provide content as TELEM. Instead, we have a local channel, Channel 15 on our cable TV network. We are reaching out to local and regional content providers to provide content on that medium, knowing that that medium is accessible all over the world if you have the app. You can always look at what’s happening in Sint Maartenand the region by following the app. That plan is in the infancy stages right now, to be honest. We are reaching out to different people now to see how we can develop that so that when people come to the island, they will get information from the channel about where to eat, where to stay, business opportunities and more.

We attend major telecommunication conferences at least two or three times a year. We attend the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on a yearly basis. Somebody from the company usually goes there and I have been several times. Then we also have regional conferences from the Caribbean Association of North American Telecommunication Organization (CANATO) which is a Caribbean telecommunication organization. I’m a board member and director on the board of CANATO, so we collaborate to normalize the communications with the islands and make sure that when people travel between the islands, they are not hit with extremely high bills. We try to keep everything localized and that’s where CANATO plays a role. In the Mobile World Congress, we see the future of technology and better understand whether it’s applicable to Sint Maarten or not and then we try to plan the implementation of it going forward.

What are your future plans for TELEM?

TELEM is going to have to do a lot of automation in the coming years. We have to use robotics and AI to provide our services. Telecommunications is not a high-profit industry. Its margins are very small and they keep getting smaller, so in order to be able to provide a proper service and keep up with the technology, you have to start to automate and make sure that you can be lean and mean. We had a restructuring earlier this year where we had to let go of some of our staff and provided them with good severance packages, because we just could not maintain the amount of staff going forward.

We are a medium-sized employer. We used to have 165 employees, which is pretty big for Sint Maarten, but right now we have between 55 and 60. We expect to grow that to 70 by next year and we already have a couple of positions that need to be filled.

In the past, telephony was simple because you were billed by the minute, so you could make a lot of money in telecommunications in the old days. And even when the internet was first launched, it was based on dial-up connections. So, you could make money with the internet and with the dial up. But then the technology changed and now everybody has a cable going into their homes for which they are billed monthly. So you get “all-you-can-eat” technology for a fixed price. That is hard for telecom operators because one home paying $50 may have two teenagers and parents living there, while next door is a retired couple also paying $50 but using much less bandwidth. That’s just how it’s structured and because of that difference, the margins kept getting smaller. We have to depend on our additional services.

We are planning to get into television, security, smart homes, smart cities and those types of technologies that can benefit from our internet backbone and internet services. People have home cameras and they can see their home from all over the world. We are trying to provide that type of service to them as well as internal connectivity within their homes. People can feel confident that their telecommunications will be up to par when they come to Sint Maarten and they’ll be able to reach out to their family and friends all over the world when they’re here because we have connectivity on the Dutch side. We also have roaming agreements on the French side, we have roaming agreements with the U.S. and Europe, so you’re not going to get hit with enormous bills when you come to Sint Maarten to travel.

What is your final message to the readers of Miami Herald?

There are a lot of opportunities in Sint Maarten. It’s a very beautiful island and a lot of the scenery is very beautiful with all the hills. We have some of the best beaches in the Caribbean and it’s easy to do business. You don’t have a lot of red tape to get your license. If you’re a serious business person, you can come in and establish a business very easily. Our Chamber of Commerce is very digital and we have a lot of lawyers and anything you need to establish a business. Investors have an opportunity here because we have a very modern telecommunication service. There is connectivity all over the place.

It is very easy to fly to Sint Maarten. There are daily flights to Miami, Atlanta and New York, as well as to France and to the Netherlands. So you can get around pretty easily. We like to brag that you can get from Sint Maarten to anywhere in the world within 24 hours if you plan your flight right. So investors have an opportunity to be in an island that is relaxing, but still very modern and business focused, with a favorable tax framework. It depends on the size of the investment, but from a telecom perspective especially, we can provide almost anything that a business would need in terms of capacity, speed, or bandwidth.