NTRC introduces app to help persons find free WIFI

Persons looking for Wi-Fi hotspots can now download two locally developed apps that will point them towards free Internet.

The apps, Vincy Wi-Fi and NTRC Connect (both for Android and iOS), were developed by Cyron Cyrus, a software engineer at the National Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (NTRC).

The NTRC officially launched the mobile applications last Tuesday at the National Insurance Services (NIS) conference room in the NIS building on Upper Bay Street.

Apollo Knights, director of the NTRC said that one of the mandates of the NTRC, apart from regulating the telecoms providers, is to improve connectivity to citizens and to execute community projects under the Universal Services Fund (USF).

He said that the NTRC implements projects to improve connectivity and over the last eight years, they have put wireless connectivity in all schools, clinics, hospitals, police stations, learning resources centres, many community centres and parks, and letting persons know where services are is another area they deal with.

“The apps allow persons who are on the road to find Wi-Fi hotspots easily,” stated Knights who added that the apps are beneficial to visitors and citizens as mobile data can be extremely expensive.

Knights said that the apps use Mapbox and not Google maps for GPS services and cost the NTRC EC$4100 in yearly operation fees. The apps can be downloaded from Play Store and the Apple Store.

“As a country and region, we need to create more locally inspired apps to meet our needs and also meet the needs of others being it regionally or globally and it is one area which the NTRC believes our country can compete with any other country globally,” Knights told the gathering.

He said that what is good about app development is that it does not require large factories or a cheap labour force to be competitive as does other industries.

“It is an area I can’t see the bigger countries trying to blacklist us on, as we have seen in the financial industry,” Knights commented while stressing that the NTRC did not have to hire someone to develop the apps.

“It would have been more costly and not allow for capacity building and knowledge transfer at the local level,” Knights said.

He noted that in 2016, the NTRC launched a version of NTRC Connect and that app allowed persons to find the hotspots but did not allow them to navigate to those spots.

“The navigation part of it wasn’t how we wanted it. We were showing a route on the map on how to get there, but you weren’t able to have it like Google with the turn by turn voice and so on, so we have been working on that feature.

“We have kept the NTRC Connect app as is, but it is a split called the Vincy Wi-Fi, so we are going two directions. The NTRC Connect app will be used internally and externally and the Vincy Wi-Fi is for visitors and other persons so some the features in the NTRC Connect app are not in the Vincy Wi-Fi app,” Knights explained.

The NTRC Connect app lists all towers, school Wi-Fi, community centres and gives the user the ability to file complaints through the app if something is not working. There are also pictures of the sites and the app allows for the addition of sites and uploading pictures. There is also a log in authorization feature and a built in GPS feature.

The apps do not use Google maps but instead run with Mapbox. Mapbox is a provider of custom online maps for websites and applications such as Foursquare, Lonely Planet, Facebook, the Financial Times, The Weather Channel and Snapchat.

Knights said that they will soon add some new features to Vincy Wi-Fi.

Commenting on the apps he designed, Cyrus said the apps allow you to choose which connectivity spots you are looking for (community wi-fi, school wi-fi or business wi-fi) while you can choose the style you want it displayed in, for example, road map, satellite map or hybrid map.

The NTRC also revealed on Tuesday that they have been working on properly mapping SVG through the OpenStreetMap initiative.

OpenStreetMap is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world.

The NTRC’s intern Khamisi Bascombe has been working on this update project and told persons on Tuesday that he has utilized the OpenStreetMap platform to digitize parts of the map of SVG.

He said OpenStreetMap works better than Google maps in SVG as Google gives us main roads only but OpenStreetMap shows the crossroads and side roads in several areas.