Tricom announced on 29 March that it has signed a five-year US$25 million contract with the Ministry of Education to provide broadband satellite Internet access and Intranet services to every public high school in the Dominican Republic. Tricom (www.tricom.net) is the second largest communications service provider in the DR. It is owned in part by Grupo Financiero Nacinal Corporation, Ltd. (46%) and Motorola, Inc. (31%). The Business Wire release says that Tricom will utilize Intellicom’s (www.vsat.net) state-of-the-art content caching technology and comprehensive family of value-added services to deliver fast and efficient end-user access to the Internet. The announcement says this implementation fulfills the promise made by President Leonel Fernandez to provide Internet access to the Dominican Republic’s 310 public high schools before the end of his term on 15 August 2000. Each high school will, for the first time, enjoy the benefits of Internet and Intranet services, allowing students and teachers at different schools to easily exchange knowledge and obtain distance-learning content that can be effectively customized and readily updated for specific grade levels or types of schools. This venture between commerce and government will enable teachers to complement existing curriculums with the most up-to-date information available. "We believe the Dominican Republic is the first country in Latin America to provide Internet access to all of its public high schools," said Carl Carlson, executive vice president for Tricom. "This is going to completely revolutionize the way the schools operate. The schools will now have the capability for streaming audio and video. We’re not just connecting students and teachers to the Web. All the schools will be interconnected so each school will have e-mail capabilities, and teachers and students will be able to exchange knowledge and share information that would be impossible without the connectivity afforded by the Intellicom system. This agreement marks another step in the current government’s administration to position the Dominican Republic as a global information economy."
