Last week I had the opportunity to attend the CANTO show in Trinidad, which focused on the communications infrastructure business in the Caribbean. Being a first time attendee, I was surprised by the energy, friendship and challenges facing many of the countries in the Caribbean. We hear about how the communications infrastructure is important to a country’s economy, but the leaders of these countries stressed the importance of building world-class infrastructure to ensure the continued economic development of many of these small island nations. I was truly impressed by the work done by government and carriers to bring wireless and broadband to these countries and how much progress has taken place.

At BroadSoft we are encouraged by this commitment, and have introduced an initiative to offer our solutions to these island nations where broadband access is still limited. By providing our rich overlay BroadWorks features on traditional fixed and wireless TDM networks, these providers can offer services such as “find me, follow me” calling and fixed-mobile convergence, i.e. unifying desktop phones with mobile devices.

We have had the pleasure to work with a few carriers in the Caribbean and they have been some of our most innovative and focused customers. To continue to support this innovative thought-leadership, we took the opportunity at CANTO to demonstrate video conferencing (thanks to Polycom for shipping us the latest VVX video phone), Unified Communications (thanks to a Microsoft OCS integration) and finally media phones (thanks to OpenPeak for shipping us their phone).

Along with lots of leading edge technology, and insightful dialog on the social economic situation in the region, the organizers of CANTO put on some excellent evening entertainment, so that we could learn and enjoy the rich “Trini” culture.

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