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Grenada

H.E. Mr Alvin DA BREO
Minister
Ministry of Information Communications Technology

23 Oct 2014


Secretary-General Toure, Excellencies, Ministers, Ambassadors, distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen: I represent the Caribbean island nation of Grenada, a small country of about a hundred thousand people and an economy of one and a half billion dollars per year.  Our size has been no impediment to the development of our Internet economy, however. 

Our island has six networks, four of which are already IPv6-enabled.

We have built an Internet exchange point, which, although it is only now entering its fourth year of operation, is already producing 70 megabits of bandwidth, or more than 600 bits per capita, approximately double the per-capita production of leading countries in the region like Argentina and Colombia, which have had IXPs for much longer. This puts Grenada on the path to Internet bandwidth self-sufficiency, and protects the privacy of Grenadian citizen’s traffic from foreign interception.

Grenada also hosts three root nameservers on-island, as well as our dot-GD country-code nameservers, anycasts dot-GD from nearly a hundred other locations around the world, and is well on its way to protecting its domain names with DNSSEC cryptographic signatures.

While achieving each of these milestones required work, the financial outlay has been minuscule and has been recouped many times over.  Ninety percent of Internet exchange points cost between four thousand and forty thousand U.S. dollars to build, and ninety percent of Internet exchange points repay their investment between three days and three weeks.  Grenada’s IXP demonstrated the truth of those statistics, costing less than five thousand dollars to build, and repaying that investment in its first month of operation. 

Our success is neither unique nor even a statistical outlier.  Grenada’s experience has sparked a wave of Internet development within the Caribbean region, and many of these same milestones have now been achieved in neighboring countries, large and small.  If Grenada and the other countries of the Caribbean can do this, so too can any nation.  All that’s required is a commitment to the open governance mechanisms of the Internet, and a willingness to welcome competition and cooperation in the private sector. 

Thank you, and I wish you a productive Plenipotentiary.