Internet & Phone providers
Oct 27th 2007, 10:43 am
#1
Forum Regular
Thread Starter
Joined: Jul 2007
Posts: 32
Internet & Phone providers
Can anyone tell me who the present broadband and wireless internet providers are in Barbados, and what their relative merits and demerits are?
Olderman
Olderman
Dec 25th 2007, 3:12 am
#2
Just Joined
Joined: Dec 2007
Posts: 5
Re: Internet & Phone providers
No one's responded to you so I'll give you the straight and narrow, although you can find other responses if you search the threads.
There's currently only one real ISP in Barbados and that is Cable and Wireless. C&W owns and operates the fiber optic submarine cable that strings from Barbados across to St. Lucia and on to Puerto Rico where it POP's into the internet backbone. All other providers on the island are a subset of this infrastructure viz; caribsurf, sunbeach, etc., who rent bandwidth from the C&W pipe. IE if C&W goes down they all go down. The only difference between them is you MIGHT get better serrvice from Caribsurf than C&W.
One company, http://www.telebarbados.com, splits the submarine cable with C&W at the source point onto the island and can be up when C&W goes down, however if the main submarine trunk is cut all of Barbados will be down.
Whereas C&W and the others provide standard DSL over copper at expensive rates - I use a 3 mb/800k down/up "elite" service at $1700 a month, Telebarbados offers a line of sight point-to-point wave relay system (like LOOK in the US) which requires perfect LOS and no heavy rain to function properly - ie it's as likely to have downtime as DSL. The only difference between the DSL and the LOS wavelength is you can subscribe for as much bandwidth as you want from Telebarbados - although they will not guarantee you they will provide all you pay for as their subscriber base grows, and they want to lock you into a long term contract. I looked seriously into investing into this service provider as a redundant ISP, however decided the cost was prohibitive. The other thing with Telebarbados is they need to locate their dish and point it to their closest transmission tower - which means not every location can install this tech and in my location they proposed mounting a 4 foot pole on my roof to ensure I cleared the trees between me and their tower - this would have looked really ugly.
I've found my C&W DSL service is up truly only as much as 80-85% of the time and I get oftentimes only 30% of the bandwidth I'm paying for - although I seem to get somewhat better service than most - probably because I'm paying for the extreme package. I considered bringing in my own satellite dish which would be covered by Telsat SA, but the cost and potential up/down time really didn't seem to warrant the effort - and I was also informed the monopoly C&W has makes importing your own internet satellite dish illegal. The max bandwidth on satellite is also currently same as C&W's max 3mb/1mb.
Many businesses on the island including banks and financial institutions are unable to function efficently due to the poor ISP service (the current bandwidth is around 10 times oversubscribed), so the dirty secret is C&W load balances amongst all subscribers to keep the system operating albeit at crawling speeds.
All this is supposed to get better when a new fiber submarine line is brought to the island - I've heard this now for some time and have not seen any validation of when its supposed to be operational. If things degrade further I'll be installing my own satellite dish, meanwhile we'll all suffer internet crawl and downtime accordingly. For users used to dedicated 8-10 MB download bandwidth for US $100-150 a month with 99% uptime this is very frustrating and clearly demonstrates how far behind infrastructure is on the island.
There's currently only one real ISP in Barbados and that is Cable and Wireless. C&W owns and operates the fiber optic submarine cable that strings from Barbados across to St. Lucia and on to Puerto Rico where it POP's into the internet backbone. All other providers on the island are a subset of this infrastructure viz; caribsurf, sunbeach, etc., who rent bandwidth from the C&W pipe. IE if C&W goes down they all go down. The only difference between them is you MIGHT get better serrvice from Caribsurf than C&W.
One company, http://www.telebarbados.com, splits the submarine cable with C&W at the source point onto the island and can be up when C&W goes down, however if the main submarine trunk is cut all of Barbados will be down.
Whereas C&W and the others provide standard DSL over copper at expensive rates - I use a 3 mb/800k down/up "elite" service at $1700 a month, Telebarbados offers a line of sight point-to-point wave relay system (like LOOK in the US) which requires perfect LOS and no heavy rain to function properly - ie it's as likely to have downtime as DSL. The only difference between the DSL and the LOS wavelength is you can subscribe for as much bandwidth as you want from Telebarbados - although they will not guarantee you they will provide all you pay for as their subscriber base grows, and they want to lock you into a long term contract. I looked seriously into investing into this service provider as a redundant ISP, however decided the cost was prohibitive. The other thing with Telebarbados is they need to locate their dish and point it to their closest transmission tower - which means not every location can install this tech and in my location they proposed mounting a 4 foot pole on my roof to ensure I cleared the trees between me and their tower - this would have looked really ugly.
I've found my C&W DSL service is up truly only as much as 80-85% of the time and I get oftentimes only 30% of the bandwidth I'm paying for - although I seem to get somewhat better service than most - probably because I'm paying for the extreme package. I considered bringing in my own satellite dish which would be covered by Telsat SA, but the cost and potential up/down time really didn't seem to warrant the effort - and I was also informed the monopoly C&W has makes importing your own internet satellite dish illegal. The max bandwidth on satellite is also currently same as C&W's max 3mb/1mb.
Many businesses on the island including banks and financial institutions are unable to function efficently due to the poor ISP service (the current bandwidth is around 10 times oversubscribed), so the dirty secret is C&W load balances amongst all subscribers to keep the system operating albeit at crawling speeds.
All this is supposed to get better when a new fiber submarine line is brought to the island - I've heard this now for some time and have not seen any validation of when its supposed to be operational. If things degrade further I'll be installing my own satellite dish, meanwhile we'll all suffer internet crawl and downtime accordingly. For users used to dedicated 8-10 MB download bandwidth for US $100-150 a month with 99% uptime this is very frustrating and clearly demonstrates how far behind infrastructure is on the island.
Jan 2nd 2008, 3:39 pm
#3
Just Joined
Joined: Jul 2007
Posts: 8
Information needed about working in Barbados
Hi everyone. First of all I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year. Now on to my question. My husband will be working for an offshore company in Barbados (construction) and he was told that he could claim 1/2 the money he makes there and claim the other 1/2 here in Canada. Does that make sense? I am just wondering why he was told that. He was also told he could claim the whole thing there if he wanted to instead. And also, could you give me an idea on what kind of taxes he would have to pay?
Thank you so much
Jan 3rd 2008, 10:31 pm
#4
Forum Regular
Joined: Feb 2007
Posts: 157
Re: Internet & Phone providers
Bajangirl:
He should get advise from the accountants of the company he will be working for. He would have to pay the tax on the income he earns in each country. Barbados and Canada have a double taxation treaty meaning that once he pays tax on the income earned in one country, it is not taxable in the other.
He should get advise from the accountants of the company he will be working for. He would have to pay the tax on the income he earns in each country. Barbados and Canada have a double taxation treaty meaning that once he pays tax on the income earned in one country, it is not taxable in the other.
