viNGN CEO Stephan Adams. Photo Credit: V.I. LEGISLATURE.
During the quarterly meeting of viNGN's board of directors on Wednesday, Chief Executive Officer Stephan Adams disclosed that the agency would be “seizing upon” a partnership opportunity with public broadcaster WTJX.
“This is our call to action to help our public radio and television in the territory since they lost $1.2 million in their federal funding,” said Mr. Adams, noting that WTJX is a reliable viNGN customer.
The partnership would entail running underground fiber to WTJX's main tower on St. Thomas “For resiliency,” Mr. Adams said. “We're also going to provide them bandwidth in trade to help them financially with the burden of losing their funding,” he added.
The viNGN CEO noted that “this is a trade, it's not a free giveaway.” For their part, WTJX would be providing “in-kind value for promotion.” For those questioning why an enterprise-scale supplier of bandwidth would need that kind of marketing support, Mr. Adams explained that “since we have such an extensive fiber hotspot deployment in the territory, we now have a greater responsibility to be able to educate the community.” He pointed out large concentrations of users at the airports and other public areas, and said that they would be rolling out “upskilling" and “cyber-aware” programs, since “we now have a direct touchpoint with the community that we didn't have before.”
Cybersecurity awareness training, already made available internally at viNGN, will be rolled out as a public service via the WTJX partnership. “That's something we have planned for next year,” Mr. Adams noted. “This collaboration between viNGN and WTJX is really a community facing one that we think will pay dividends in the community from a standpoint of computer skilling and computer use protection,” he concluded.
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