A Day in the Life of Cable Bahamas

With a fully addressable 750 MHz HFC architecture almost completed, Cable Bahamas serves some 35,000 residential subs (plus vacationers) and is ready to offer telephony. The catch: the Caribbean island's telecom regulator is also its telco provider.

After selling off rural cable TV systems in Newfoundland and New Brunswick in the early 1990s, entrepreneur Philip Keeping decided to venture outside of Canada. Specifically, he set his sights on The Bahamas in the Caribbean, where he was granted two franchises in October 1994.

Cable Bahamas now serves 27,000 subscribers in Nassau and 8,000 subscribers in the Grand Bahamas, including Freeport, with plans to serve 50,000 total customers by early '98. Additionally, Keeping hopes to serve 5,000 hotel rooms - the system presently is in 3,000 rooms - by mid '97.

"We think The Bahamas is the best market for cable by far in the Caribbean," says Keeping, pointing out that the island is English-speaking which makes programming less of a problem; has the highest per capita income in the region; is close to the U.S., so knowledge of cable is high; has a 110/220 electrical system; uses NTSC rather than PAL; and is tax free.

"This makes for a very attractive investment environment", observes Keeping. Apparently, others agree, as the system is 51%-owned by local residents (a government stipulation that was satisfied with a $20 million public offering in June '95), who have seen the company's stock rise 200 % from $1 to $3.

The key to Cable Bahamas' future success, says Keeping, is the system's almost-completed 750 MHz hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) architecture in Nassau. The system is modular in design, implementing 1310 nanometer lasers - with four or five nodes on one laser - that feed pockets as small as 1,000 subs. This provides the system with the ability to narrowcast.

"We run fiber right into the hotels and into 200-home nodes," says Keeping, noting that most cable systems building HFC are building 500 to 1,000 nodes. With the cost of fiber declining (about the same cost as a trunk amp), Cable Bahamas decided to put fiber deep into the system, with a maximum of two line extenders off every node.

With so much fiber in place, the number of active elements beyond the node is small, providing the system with the ideal architecture to add on a PCS or full telephony network at a relatively low cost. Cable Bahamas' total HFC architecture on an actual subscriber basis is running $750 per customer.

Equipments vendors for the network include Alcatel (fiber), ADC Telecommunications (nodes, lasers and cross connects) Scientific-Atlanta (headend), General Instrument (CFT 2200 set-top) and Canadian taps provider Electroline. Says Keeping: "We've gone 100% addressable on our taps and are really happy with that decision. It put about a $2 million premium on our network, but we think it's paid for itself already because we don't have to roll a truck to do an unpaid disconnect."

"We're doing some stuff that most people are only talking about," he says. For instance, Cable Bahamas is adding a 20-channel digital video server for residential and hotel pay-per-view.

Another is cable telephony. Technically, the company is prepared to offer phone service in Nassau, but government regulations have put the plans on hold. The problem (and it's a big one) is that the regulator and the provider, Bahamas Telecommunications Corp., are one in the same. "It's really an odd regulatory environment here," observes Keeping, "because you have the regulator and the telco provider as the same entity. And they're extremely protective of their monopoly.

" In Freeport proper - Cable Bahamas' other franchise area - the regulatory environment is a little different. "Our license over there allows us to do data," adds Keeping. "And we fully intend to do that by third quarter '97."

On the marketing side, Cable Bahamas, the island's only cable provider, has a generic sell, averaging 60 to 70 installs per day. As for collections, very few of the company's customers are mail-ins or use pre-authorized checking. "Very high percentages of our people actually walk in to pay, which is a bit of a management challenge because on peak days at the end of the month, we're processing 2,500 to 2,800 people. We had some growing pains but right now we get people through quickly."

* Published in the February 1997 issue of International Cable and written by Andy Jose.