BrightPath and St Lucia National Youth Council will work together to produce ICT-based solutions for increasing youth employment and to develop programmes to foster technology-based innovation.
Read MoreAn Internet exchange point would play a crucial role in facilitating the growth of St. Lucia’s emerging digital economy, an international technology expert has said. Bevil Wooding, an Internet strategist with US-based Packet Clearing House (PCH), said the Caribbean island already has a wealth of human resource talent in the information and communications technology sector.
“St Lucia can accelerate its national development agenda by focusing attention on human resource development and by locating critical Internet infrastructure, such as IXPs, on the island,” Wooding stated.
The comments came at the launch of a digital content education agreement between the St Lucia National Youth Council and BrightPath Foundation, a non-profit organisation that provides technology education. Wooding was speaking on the role of IXPs in facilitating the development of local content.
Christopher Roberts, project coordinator for the Caribbean Regional Infrastructure Project with the government of St-Lucia, explained that an IXP works by keeping local Internet traffic routed locally and thus avoiding the costs, inefficiencies and delays incurred when local Internet traffic has to traverse expensive international routes.
Roberts explained that there is considerable demand for bandwidth intensive applications, cloud-based services and high-speed networks in St Lucia, particularly among the island's youth.
“An internet exchange point will play an important role in underpinning our digital economy. Our country already has a pool of creative young persons, itching to take advantage of the opportunities the Internet presents. But our longstanding infrastructure, bandwidth and cost of access issues have been a major stumbling block.
“A domestic IXP can provide new opportunities for technology-based innovation by our youth and our entrepreneurs.”
Wooding said IXPs would also help lower the cost of delivering services to end-users, speed up transmissions, strengthen the resilience of local networks, and decrease international Internet connectivity costs.
“Without the appropriate infrastructure, government, businesses and consumers will continue to be frustrated, and the promise benefits of the Internet age will continue to elude the country,” he said.
PCH will provide technical assistance and advice to the government of St. Lucia for the local Internet Exchange Point.
At present only the British Virgin Islands, Haiti, Grenada, St Maarten, Curacao and Dominica have IXPs. In conjunction with the Caribbean Telecommunications Union, PCH is currently assisting several other Caribbean countries, including Barbados, Jamaica and St Kitts and Nevis in establishing local IXPs. PCH is a non-profit research organisation, and the world’s leading implementer of IXPs.
Recent attacks on Caribbean computer networks by Internet hackers should be a major concern for Caribbean businesses and governments.
“Computer hacking is a global problem," technology expert Bevil Wooding said at the fifth regional meeting of the Caribbean Network Operators Group (CaribNOG) in Bridgetown, Barbados.
"As the region increases in its dependence on information and communication technologies, it must at the same time build greater capacity to manage and protect its technology assets."
Wooding gave several examples from around the world of volunteer groups of ethical hackers who had mobilised to protect their local and regional networks.
“Since the Caribbean is no less vulnerable to cyberattacks, we must make similar investments in the development of our human resources. The region needs a trustworthy technical community, capable of defending Caribbean networks. CaribNOG is key part of the response to that challenge,” he said.
The Barbados meeting, CaribNOG’s largest to date, drew 100 tech practitioners from around the region and as far away as Africa, Europe and New Zealand. In his address, Wooding, one of the co-founders of CaribNOG, described the meetings as “invaluable for advancing the skills of the region’s ICT professionals who design, procure, operate, manage and secure the network infrastructure.”
The CaribNOG 5 program included a mix of hands-on technical training sessions delivered by regional and international facilitators. Topics covered over the three-day event included cybersecurity, Internet Exchange Point management, IPv6 deployment and DNSSEC implementation techniques.
“We need more people in the Caribbean with an advanced understanding network engineering. Diligent enough to stay current. But also bold enough to experiment and innovate to solve local as well as global needs.”
One major issue discussed at the event was the changeover from IPv4 to IPv6.
IPv4 protocol was developed as a management tool providing addresses for all devices that use the Internet in the 1970s and published in 1981. However, the number of devices now connected to the Internet may be equal to or exceed the global population. This explosion of IP enabled devices on the market has exhausted addresses under the IPv4 protocol.
Its replacement, IPv6, is the next-generation protocol, providing approximately 340 undecillion addresses (340 trillion trillion trillion) IP addresses. This is calculated to be sufficient to ensure the availability of IP addresses to meet the needs of the rapidly growing Internet, far into the future.
Wooding, an Internet Strategist with US-based research firm Packet Clearing House (PCH), also touched on the status of Internet Exchange Point (IXP) proliferation in the region. An IXP’s primary purpose is to allow networks to interconnect directly, resulting in savings in cost of delivering local Internet traffic, reduced latency and increased network resilience.
He charged participants to “embrace the opportunity to cooperate for the greater good”.
The three-day event was jointly hosted by the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU), the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) and Packet Clearing House (PCH), with the support of the Government of Barbados, The Internet Society (ISOC), the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC) and Columbus Communications.