To get one telecommunications site up in Jamaica takes an average of about 14 months, Stephen Price, vice-president and general manager of FLOW Jamaica, told a gathering of utility leaders, according to the Gleaner. Utility executives across the sector used the occasion to press government for faster regulatory turnaround, warning that prolonged approval delays are undermining investment across infrastructure sectors, not just telecoms.
Price described the process as fragmented rather than simply slow: applicants must clear the National Environment and Planning Agency, the Ministry of Health, and individual municipal corporations, often sequentially rather than in parallel, for technologies that are deployed globally with far less friction. These are technologies used globally, he said, but still we have to go through this process over and over again. He argued that faster approvals would translate directly into broader coverage, not just faster individual projects.
The complaint echoes a wider pattern documented in Jamaicas property and construction sector: developers separately reported that environmental, planning and building approvals for major projects can stretch on for years, with court challenges over permit sequencing adding further delay once approvals are actually granted. A long-overdue set of formal Environmental Impact Assessment regulations, first proposed by the Jamaica Environment Trust in 2011, remains unfinished more than a decade later, despite repeated commitments to complete it under successive national action plans.
Price was careful to note that no single agency can fix the bottleneck alone, and that stronger coordination between NEPA, municipal corporations and other referral agencies matters more than speeding up any one step in isolation. The practical cost of the current system, though, is concrete rather than abstract: infrastructure that could exist faster, and investment that goes elsewhere while Jamaica works through a queue.
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