LIBERTY CARIBBEAN, STARLINK DIRECT TO CELL ADDS DATA MESSAGING CONNECTIVITY TO ITS EMERGENCY SERVICE IN JAMAICA IN AFTERMATH OF HURRICANE MELISSA
Liberty Caribbean, operators of Flow Jamaica and Liberty Business communicate data messaging connectivity is now available to over 70% of its mobile data customers through Starlink Direct to Cell satellites in the aftermath of devastating Hurricane Melissa.
As Hurricane Melissa made landfall in the parish of St. Elizabeth early Tuesday morning the company announced it was able to deliver emergency connectivity via SMS and text services to its customers. This was possible through spectrum approved via the Spectrum Management Authority and the Ministry of Energy, Transport, and Telecommunications to allow the company to collaborate with Starlink’s Direct to Cell services.
‘The availability of our FLOW Essential service provided basic SMS and text messaging as Hurricane Melissa made landfall. Throughout the day we worked closely with Starlink and their Direct to Cell division to restore as many communication options as possible to our customers in Jamaica and now we’re able to also offer data messaging connectivity to over 70% of our mobile data customers,” said Inge Smidts, CEO Liberty Caribbean. “This means we can now provide essential emergency- mobile data connectivity in addition to SMS and text on the FLOW Starlink network,” she added.
“Nation rebuilding and the road to recovery will be long, given the magnitude of the storm and sheer devastation left in its wake. The ability to communicate will be critical and we wanted to give our customers one less thing to worry about,” Smidts concluded.
This collaboration between Liberty Caribbean and Starlink will offer island wide network redundancy to deliver satellite connectivity seamlessly direct to mobile customers while the local mobile network infrastructure is unavailable.
