Wind Telecom: A Rising Star in the Caribbean

The Dominican Republic is one of the most competitive telecom markets in the Caribbean. Operating in this market is challenging. Wind Telecom stands out from the competition thanks to its services and customer-oriented business strategy. Wind Telecom has taken the lead in deploying the first 4G TD-LTE network in the Dominican Republic. ZTE Technologies recently interviewed Damian Baez, CEO of Wind Telecom. He talked about Wind Telecom’s challenges, major businesses, 4G deployments and ZTE’s contributions to Wind Telecom.

Q: Would you please briefly introduce Wind Telecom?

A: Wind Telecom is an emerging telecommunications and content provider in the Dominican Republic. It offers fixed and mobile broadband internet, data connectivity, VoIP telephony, standard and high definition paid television, and data center services for both residential and business customers in the main cities of the Dominican Republic. Wind Telecom has begun operating commercially since February 2008. It is the only telecommunications provider to use reliable wireless technologies, as well as microwave radio and fiber optics solutions to deliver a competitive and high-quality product portfolio to its end-users.

Q: In the Dominican telecom market, what unique advantages does Wind Telecom have?

A: We are a convergent company centric on IP solutions to provide mobility in our fixed services (internet and voice), which allows customers to bring their device wherever their needs are focused. We also have a significant home-passed volume reaching all consumer segments with a rich variety of national and international TV channels in our paid TV offering. Wind Telecom is the only company that offers billing per-second in its voice services for all business and consumer segments. This brings huge savings to our customers. The company is always focused on adding more value to clients and centric in providing an excellent customer service and experience.

Q: In the mobile internet era, what key challenges have Wind Telecom encountered in terms of technologies and operations? How do you tackle them?

A: Wind Telecom deployed the first wide-range 4G-WiMAX 2.5 GHz infrastructure in the Dominican Republic. When choosing WiMAX, we were conscious that this technology was intended to be a mid-term solution for wireless broadband access and would evolve rapidly to LTE. With that in mind, we designed a technology roadmap and network architecture that allowed us to easily migrate to LTE. A year ago, we began our migration path by choosing TD-LTE as our new standard. LTE will be the main driver of broadband mobile internet access. We are currently deploying 4G TD-LTE in the main urban and rural zones of the country, which will allow us to expand our services portfolio of high-speed internet (both fixed and mobile).

Q: Nowadays, most operators are in the transition to the service oriented model. What is your opinion? Will Wind Telecom take steps for transformation?

A: The transition to a service-oriented model has been our main focus since the genesis of our company. We have improved our customer service standards to differentiate ourselves and become the role model in the telecom sector. Also, we have taken the lead toward the development of an open service approach to facilitate interactions between our clients and customer service agents through the use of a Web2 strategy, so we will be reachable by different means.

Q: Could you please share with us Wind Telecom’s tariff strategy?

A: We plan to create a best-fit service tariff to meet every customer need and style of usage, based on speed and capacity. Also we offer differentiation through a value proposition that balances the price that the customer is willing to pay with the required bandwidth and QoS. Considering that broadband is evolving to become a commodity, we need to identify the type of services that will ensure customer satisfaction and retention by creating premium services that can be highly valued by our customers, such as unlimited data packages, streaming, and gaming as well as additional services. In order to do this, we need to understand and know customer needs. Being able to create customer profiles is a key factor to success in a very competitive market.

Q: What do you think of the current telecom status in Dominican Republic? What role do you expect Wind Telecom to play in the country’s future development?

A: The telecom market in the Dominican Republic is intensely competitive, with high teledensity levels. There are three mobile operators and a new triple play company. It is one of the most competitive markets in the Caribbean. The country has seen considerable growth and development since the launch of the country’s first wireless network. Mobile market growth has leveled off, so we expect that the new battleground will be high-speed data services. With the launch of our new 4G TD-LTE network, Wind Telecom will bring an attractive bundled value proposition and create momentum to gain more market share. We will improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of Dominican families that have limited access to broadband internet.

Q: Wind Telecom has two major businesses: internet and television. Could you tell us your development priorities in the next three years?

A: We believe that data is the growth engine of the future, and a cutting edge technology such as 4G LTE, can empower people like never before. The huge demand for internet-enabled devices among the largely young population, along with increase in consumption of data on internet and rising demand for content are some of the factors fuelling the exponential growth in data. Since the mobile internet will be the driver of revenue growth in the near future, our main focus is to participate in the internet market. We need to create a platform that will give us the stability to provide services that meet customer needs while maintaining high quality and network capacity that supports the forecasted increment in internet traffic over the coming years. Paid television is a very attractive element to complement the triple play service, and there is a lot of room to grow in the country for a provider to focus on high-quality service and customer satisfaction. Video on demand and content delivery using the internet is also our primary focus over the next three years.

Q: ZTE is cooperating with Wind Telecom for the first TD-LTE 4G network of Dominican Republic. Could you comment on ZTE’s turnkey solution and its contributions as a partner of Wind Telecom?

A: ZTE meets all requirements during our RFP process and is fully committed to planning, designing, supplying and deploying state-of-the-art TD-LTE network. In line with our vision of deploying the most sustainable TD-LTE network and offering our customers the highest data speed in the country, we feel this partnership fits in our strategy and our plans to make Wind Telecom the preferred broadband internet service provider. We are happy to partner with ZTE for the deployment of our 4G TD-LTE network, the first in the Dominican Republic and one of the first in Latin America.

Q: What do you think of the current status of the 4G TD-LTE ecosystem?

A: TD-LTE is set to grow massively in 2015 and its evolution to Advanced-LTE will deliver next-generation networks and devices to meet the increasing demand for data and video content that will reach more than 50% growth rate annually. Innovations and developments will make this growth possible for all consumers’ style. We feel confident that TD-LTE ecosystem and ZTE technology roadmap will enable Wind Telecom to capitalize on such a great market opportunity, taking advantage of its vast spectrum capacity in 2.5 GHz.   
Q: What new trends do you see in the global telecom market?

A: Customers want to choose the type of content they see and where and when they see it. With the advent of OTT players such as Netflix, this trend has become a reality (TV everywhere). Because of the big amount of data that people are consuming, there is huge demand for storing personal information in the cloud. People want to own their time and do things whenever they like, which gives rise to services like wireless streaming and mobile game that are highly required by customers. Internet of things will do easiest life of the people and will also create a great opportunity to operators and ICT.