Fifteen Million Without Broadband: What CANTO's First Caribbean Mobile Economy Report Means for AI

• GSMA launched the first Caribbean edition of its Mobile Economy report at CANTO's 41st Annual Conference and Trade Exhibition in Punta Cana, 9-12 August 2026.
• 15 million Caribbean citizens still lack mobile broadband, and 4 million households remain without fibre, while regional data demand is projected to grow five-fold by 2030.
• CANTO C9 Chair Lisa Agard warned the region's widening infrastructure and investment gap could undermine its ability to compete in AI, fintech and digital government, and put the gigabit-society investment shortfall above US$9 billion.
• Four major global platforms earned US$11.5 billion from Caribbean users in 2024 while contributing comparatively little direct investment to the networks that traffic runs on.
• CAIA's reading: every regional AI roadmap assumes a network the GSMA report says does not yet reach a large share of the population those roadmaps are written for.

A national AI strategy is a strategy for the citizens the network already reaches. GSMA's first Caribbean edition of The Mobile Economy, launched at CANTO's 41st Annual Conference and Trade Exhibition in Punta Cana between 9 and 12 August 2026, put a number on how many Caribbean citizens that currently leaves out: 15 million without mobile broadband, 4 million households without fibre. Every governance framework CARICOM has endorsed this year assumes a network this report says is not yet built.

That is not a small caveat sitting under an otherwise upbeat telecom report. Mobile technology and services contributed US$21 billion to the Caribbean economy in 2025, 8.1% of regional GDP, supporting 170,000 jobs, and GSMA expects that figure to reach US$23 billion by 2030 on the back of 5G, AI and IoT adoption. Those are real, growing numbers. They sit next to a broadband gap large enough to hold the entire population of several CARICOM member states combined, and a warning from the region's own telecom association that the gap is widening, not closing, at the exact moment the Caribbean is writing its first generation of AI policy.

What CANTO 41 and the GSMA Report Actually Found

CANTO's 41st Annual Conference and Trade Exhibition ran under the theme "Elevate the Caribbean: From Connectivity to Global Competitiveness," and the timing of GSMA's report was not incidental. Lucas Gallitto, GSMA's Head of Latin America and the Caribbean, framed the region's core problem as one of scale and geography: markets too small and too fragmented for a single operator to recover network investment the way a larger, contiguous market can. That framing matters because it explains why the Caribbean's connectivity gap has persisted through multiple telecom generations rather than closing on its own as technology got cheaper elsewhere.

The report's headline numbers describe a sector that is genuinely growing. Fifth-generation networks covered 10% of Caribbean mobile connections in 2025 and are projected to reach 23%, around 5.9 million connections, by 2030. Three markets, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, already account for more than 65% of every 5G connection in the region, with Trinidad and Tobago alone expected to reach roughly 28% adoption and 600,000 connections inside that window. Inside the sector itself, AI adoption is already ahead of the region's general adoption curve: 35% of Caribbean mobile operators now run AI agents in customer service, and operators are increasingly leaning on AI-driven network automation to manage costs that keep climbing regardless of usage growth.

Set against that growth is the report's usage and coverage data. Roughly 10% of the Caribbean population still lives outside any mobile network coverage at all. A further 49% live inside coverage but do not use mobile internet, held back by handset cost, digital skills and a lack of locally relevant content rather than by signal strength. Add the 15 million citizens the report counts as lacking mobile broadband and the 4 million households still without a fibre connection, and the picture is of a region investing heavily in the networks it already has while a substantial share of its population sits outside every one of them.

The Gap Agard Named Out Loud

CANTO C9 Chair Lisa Agard, who is also Chief Executive Officer of TSTT, did not leave that gap implicit. Speaking around the conference, she said the Caribbean faces a widening digital infrastructure and investment gap that could undermine its ability to compete in artificial intelligence, fintech, digital government and other emerging sectors. She put the region's transition to a full gigabit society, universal fibre and 5G coverage sufficient to support the AI and data-heavy applications now on every government's roadmap, at an investment shortfall above US$9 billion. On the International Telecommunication Union's ICT Development Index, the standard international benchmark for national digital infrastructure, she noted the Caribbean sits 15 to 20 points behind Europe and the United States, a gap measured in years of investment cycles rather than a single budget line any one government can close alone.

Agard's other figure explains why closing that gap has been so difficult for operators to fund on their own. Seventy percent of the data crossing Caribbean networks now comes from over-the-top services: streaming platforms, social media, messaging apps that ride on infrastructure they did not build and generally do not fund directly. GSMA's report quantifies what that imbalance is worth: four major global content platforms generated more than US$11.5 billion in revenue from Caribbean users in 2024, while their direct contribution to the regional network investment carrying that traffic remained limited. Regional operators absorb the capacity cost of that traffic growth. The platforms driving the growth capture most of the revenue it generates.

Why a Telecom Report Is an AI Story

CARICOM has endorsed or launched five separate AI-facing initiatives in 2026: the UNESCO Caribbean AI Policy Roadmap, the CTU Caribbean AI Task Force's Final Report, the CARICOM-UNDP Regional Programme on AI, a Blue-Ribbon Commission on AI created at the 51st summit, and Trinidad and Tobago's own multibillion-dollar data centre and AI infrastructure push. Every one of those documents describes targets for adoption, literacy, governance or investment across a population GSMA's report says is not yet fully connected. None of the five, as written, includes a funded commitment to the 15 million citizens or the 4 million households the connectivity gap actually names.

That gap is not evenly distributed, which is part of why it is easy to miss in a regional communique. Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago hold the bulk of the region's 5G capacity and, not coincidentally, the bulk of the AI investment activity CAIA has tracked this year, from Trinidad's data centre MOUs to Jamaica's mandatory civil-service AI training order. Smaller territories with thinner telecom markets, exactly the ones the ITU index and GSMA's coverage figures flag as furthest behind, are the ones least likely to see a national AI strategy translate into anything a citizen without a fibre connection can actually use. A regional AI roadmap written for 17 nations, funded and deployed unevenly across five, is a roadmap for a fraction of the region it claims to serve.

The operators themselves are not waiting for the gap to close before applying AI to their own operations. GSMA's finding that 35% of Caribbean mobile operators already run AI customer-service agents, well ahead of adoption rates in most other sectors CAIA has covered this year, shows a sector using AI to manage the cost pressure of serving a fragmented, partially unconnected market more efficiently. That is a rational response to Agard's US$9 billion gap. It is also a reminder that AI adoption inside the telecom sector and AI access for the citizens that sector serves are two different curves, moving at two different speeds, and only one of them shows up in a national AI literacy target.

The Smaller Markets Carry the Gap Disproportionately

The connectivity gap is not spread evenly across 17 nations, and the unevenness has consequences beyond AI adoption. GSMA's report found that only 39% of Caribbean island nations currently have a multi-hazard early warning system built on their telecom networks, in a region that sits directly in the Atlantic hurricane belt and has already lived through Hurricane Melissa's disaster response this year. The same networks a national AI strategy needs to reach citizens with services are the networks disaster agencies need to reach citizens with warnings. A fibre and 5G build-out framed only around AI competitiveness misses that the gap it is trying to close already carries a cost measured in something more immediate than a missed policy target.

Smaller OECS markets face a version of the fragmentation problem Gallitto described that larger Caribbean territories do not. A single undersea cable landing, a single mobile operator with a viable business case, a single regulator setting spectrum policy for a market of a few hundred thousand subscribers: each of those is harder to fund at a scale that recovers investment than the equivalent decision in Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago. That is precisely why Agard's US$9 billion figure and the ITU's 15-to-20-point gap are regional averages sitting on top of a much wider spread, where the territories furthest from 5G coverage are also, generally, the ones with the least capacity to close the gap through domestic investment alone.

What Closing the Gap Would Actually Require

None of the figures in GSMA's report point to a single fix. A US$9 billion shortfall spread across 17 fragmented markets, each with its own regulator, spectrum policy and fiscal capacity, is not a problem any one government solves with a single procurement. What the report does make clear is where the money currently is not going: the platforms generating US$11.5 billion a year from Caribbean users are not, on the region's own numbers, matching that with proportional network investment, and the region's own operators are absorbing a 70% OTT-driven traffic load without a corresponding revenue share to fund the fibre and 5G build-out that traffic requires.

Three levers show up repeatedly in how CANTO and GSMA frame the shortfall. First, regulatory harmonisation across the 17 markets, so a single 5G spectrum decision or fibre permitting rule does not have to be renegotiated country by country, is the kind of standing cost the Blue-Ribbon Commission on AI and the CTU Task Force could plausibly help resolve if either body treated spectrum policy as part of its brief rather than someone else's. Second, a platform investment mechanism that ties some share of the US$11.5 billion Caribbean users generate for global content platforms back into regional network capacity, an idea CANTO has floated in various forms for several conference cycles without a binding agreement yet attached to it. Third, blended finance that lets a development bank or multilateral fund absorb the part of the investment case a single operator in a market of a few hundred thousand subscribers cannot recover on its own. None of the three is new. What is new is a GSMA report willing to put a Caribbean-specific number against the gap those three levers are meant to close.

CANTO's own theme for the conference, from connectivity to global competitiveness, names the sequencing every Caribbean AI strategy has so far skipped past. Competitiveness in AI, fintech or digital government is not a policy choice a government makes independently of the network its citizens actually have. It is downstream of whether that network reaches them at all. The StarApple AI network of ventures, which Adrian Dunkley founded in 2023 as the Caribbean's first company built specifically around AI products and services, has built sovereign AI systems for Caribbean governments on top of exactly this uneven infrastructure, which is part of why Dunkley, now President of the Caribbean AI Association and Chairman of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, has argued consistently that regional AI governance work has to include the network layer, not treat it as a separate telecom conversation running on its own track. Private capital vehicles built for the region, including the regional fund 14West AI, have already had to price fragmented, unevenly connected markets into every investment case they build across the Caribbean, long before a GSMA report gave that fragmentation a dollar figure.

What GSMA's report and Agard's warning add to the region's AI conversation is not a new problem. It is a number for an old one, attached for the first time to the specific report and conference where the Caribbean's telecom and AI communities were both in the same room. Fifteen million citizens without broadband is not an asterisk on a mobile economy report. It is the population every Caribbean AI roadmap has to reach before its targets mean anything, and as of this August, the region's own telecom leadership has said plainly that the investment to reach them has not yet been found.

Related Reading Across the Caribbean AI Network

• CAIA on Trinidad's AI data centre MOUs and the Caribbean AI Task Force's governance rules
• CAIA on CARICOM's Blue-Ribbon AI Commission and the region's five overlapping AI bodies
• StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company
• Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, on AI governance and risk across the region

This article is supported by StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first artificial intelligence company, founded by Adrian Dunkley, who now leads both the Caribbean AI Association and the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council. CAIA reads a telecom conference in Punta Cana as squarely inside its mandate for the same reason Dunkley has argued for years: a region cannot govern what it has not yet connected, and no AI strategy is regional if fifteen million of the people it is written for cannot reach it.