Liberty Business Introduces Technologies for a Smart City

Liberty Caribbean, operators of Flow and Liberty Business, having officially launched its 5G mobile network in Jamaica, put on a clinic on what the next generation of telecommunication technologies can unlock for Jamaica's growth and transformation.

 

And while the island nation may not have been able to showcase it on the world stage in 2026, the forward-thinking impetus to operate in a digital first environment, can as of now, benefit from worldclass technologies as described by senior business development partner Carol Robertson.

 

Robertson said, “Smart city is a buzz word that everybody keeps talking about. But what does it really mean? It means deploying technology to automate our business processes one at a time.

 

“And our solution, our city, our business becomes smart when you kick over a certain threshold in terms of the number of solutions that you've deployed and the number of auto automated processes that you have.

 

“ But if we look at it from an efficiency standpoint, we can look at public transportation, smart parking, we can look at lighting, and I'm going to talk a little bit at some of those. sustainability because we're environmentally conscious now and we want to manage our emissions and then we also have to manage our safety, our public health and all the other things that come into it. But at the end of the day, smart solutions are for everybody.”

 

While formations may vary, the adaptability of its applications are astounding.

 

Robertson says the technology is fit for purpose across a diverse array of functions that can have a genuine impact on quality of life.

 

“We can take the healthcare journey from the beginning um ambulatory care called from home even preventative all the way to post-operative, heaven forbid, where we're now allowing persons to go home and recuperate faster because they're in their own environment with loved ones and more comfortable. We can also support the engagement with the patients and doctors so that we can actually prevent health care crisis. A lot of the non-communicable diseases that we have in Jamaica are manageable. If we if we do the right things and we stay in touch with our doctors, we can maintain good health.”

 

 It's just part of a broader vision.

 

Robertson said there's a category of smart solutions she absolutely loves, called computer vision.

 

 

 

“And those same cameras that you are looking at on your phones, monitoring your home, monitoring your business place, we can apply AI to your data stream. We don't have to sell you the cameras. We will if you want us to, but we just need the data stream. We'll apply some AI algorithms to it and we can manage a number of use cases. How many of us are still closing our businesses for one or two days to count stock? We're still doing that. But with computer vision and putting your cameras in the right places, you can count your inventory in a split second.”

 

From building management, real time energy monitoring to smart solutions for fleet management. Efficiencies in those domains may be improved by an order of magnitude.

 

“With our fleet management solution, we can do so much more. We can check the fatigue level of drivers. We can detect bad driving. We can monitor the engine to determine if it's time for preventative maintenance, not responsive repair.”

 

However, Kevin Gordon, CEO, Simply Secure, and Camela Hamilton, Senior Product Manager for cyber security, both cautioned against getting caught out of position by bad actors who have undergone their own digital transition to AI, and who will increasingly consider testing the defences of Jamaica and its businesses.

 

Hamilton said, “Cyber security is the key enabler for my business outcomes because think about it all of the transformation that you've been hearing about the infrastructure will it make any sense if you suffer a cyber security breach?”

 

Gordon said, “I don't think yet we have realized that we are now prime targets because we have still a lot of us are still in the mentality that the things that we had before the policies we had before the controls we had in 2004, 2010… we still have people with Windows 7 machines. There's one cyber um threat actor that created an entire scenario on Zoom. They had the entire company  directory and he took out the individuals, created an avatar for them that looked like the individuals, called the meeting with the finance director and then the individual thought that he was talking with somebody legitimate and sent a couple million dollars across because he thought it was legitimate. The landscape is changing. the threats are changing and we also have to change.”

 

Hamilton continued, “…With all of the investment that is pouring into the region. You're going to realize that just being financially sound is not going to be a green flag for any type of investment, right? Your cyber security posture, your hygiene, how do you deal with incidents?  That is going to be the new vector or index by which you are measured for any type of potential investment.”