A telecoms strategy for Jersey has been published, identifying a number of recommendations for the Island-wide approach to the telecoms sector over the coming years. Telecoms is a key enabler for the digital sector, as well as the majority of businesses and islanders that now use the Internet on a regular basis. The strategy supports a number of goals from the States 2015-2018 Strategic Plan, including:

• Increased focus on new, high potential growth sectors          
  
• Productivity-led growth across all Jersey's economic sectors            
  
• Competition helps contain prices in key markets         
  

The review was led by Oxera, an economics consultancy with expertise in telecoms and existing understanding of Jersey's economy and institutional arrangements.

To coordinate the strategy, a Telecoms Strategy Steering Group was convened with representation from the Economists Unit, Treasury and Digital Jersey as well as the Chief Minister's Department. A wide range of stakeholders were engaged as part of this process including Ministers, States Members, telecoms companies, development agencies, consumer groups, business groups and the regulator.

The strategy makes a number of recommendations including:

• Be a fast adopter of next generation technologies by adopting, as a general principle, proactive policies to encourage investment in next generation technologies that have been tested elsewhere.
  
• Adopt policies to incentivise mobile network sharing and rollout of mobile next generation technologies such as 5G across relevant Government departments and CICRA.
  
• CICRA should ensure that JT supplies other operators with wholesale access to the Gigabit network on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) basis, and that wholesale access seekers get access to wholesale products, which allow access seekers to compete based on differentiated retail services.
  
• Ensure that all Jersey citizens and residents benefit from improved connectivity (for example, they are all able to access services such as e-Gov and e-Health).
  
• Adopt an explicit 'resilience policy' to maintain the resilience of off-island links. 
  

The full report is available to download below, along with the Terms of Reference