KINGSTON, Jamaica — In the wake of Hurricane Melissa, Jamaica’s telecommunications infrastructure has faced significant disruptions, with Digicel reporting that 26% of its mobile network was offline as of Tuesday morning. The primary cause of this outage is the widespread power loss across the island. According to Daryl Vaz, Minister of Energy, Transport and Telecommunications, 209 mobile sites are currently operating on generators, while nine are relying on batteries. Additionally, 20% of fibre-to-home customers are offline due to power outages in their residences. Minister Vaz made these remarks during a special media briefing at the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management’s operations center. He emphasized that Digicel’s teams are prioritizing the most severely affected areas and will continue to fuel generators until power is restored by the Jamaica Public Service. Digicel is also collaborating with the Spectrum Management Authority (SMA) to enhance its spectrum bandwidth channels, leveraging lessons learned from Hurricane Beryl, which demonstrated that mobile infrastructure recovers faster than fixed infrastructure. In a parallel development, Minister Vaz announced that he had signed licenses at 3:00 am Tuesday to allocate additional spectrum to Liberty Caribbean, the parent company of Flow Jamaica. He expressed optimism about Flow’s commitment to Jamaica’s recovery, particularly through its innovative partnership with Starlink. This collaboration will introduce mobile connectivity via satellite, enabling 4G LTE customers to send SMS and text messages even when local networks are down. Minister Vaz lauded this initiative as a significant step forward in ensuring communication resilience during disasters.