Montego Bay is the capital of the parish of St. James in Jamaica. The city is the fourth-largest urban area in the country by population, after Kingston, Spanish Town, and Portmore, all of which form the Greater Kingston Metropolitan Area, home to over half a million people.[1] As a result, Montego Bay is the second-largest anglophone city in the Caribbean, after Kingston.
Montego Bay is a popular tourist destination featuring duty-free shopping, a cruise line terminal and several beaches and resorts. The city is served by the Donald Sangster International Airport, the busiest airport in the Anglophone Caribbean, which is located within the official city limits. The city is enclosed in a watershed, drained by several rivers such as the Montego River.[2] Montego Bay is referred to as "The Second City", "MoBay" or "Bay".
Toponymy
Christopher Columbus named the bay of Montego, Golfo de Buen Tiempo ("Fair Weather Gulf"). The name "Montego Bay" is believed to have originated as a corruption of the Spanish word manteca ("lard"), allegedly because during the Spanish period it was the port where lard, leather and beef were exported.[3]
The Arawak tribe of South America are Jamaica's first known inhabitants and were there to greet Columbus when he ventured to the island in 1494.[4] Jamaica was a colony of Spain from 1511 until 1655, when Oliver Cromwell's Caribbean expedition, the Western Design, drove the Spanish from the island. After the British removed the Spanish rule, along with the majority of all buildings and infrastructure, the colonials established the Parish of St. James which directly influenced the area in becoming a huge contributor of sugar cane. In fact, during this period of British governing, Montego Bay was the largest producer of sugar cane on the island of Jamaica, giving the region more value than originally anticipated.[3]
Throughout the duration of slavery, from the mid-17th century until 1834, and well into the 20th century, the town of Montego Bay functioned primarily as a sugarcane port. The island's last major slave revolt, the Christmas Rebellion or Baptist War (1831–1832) took place in and around the area of Montego Bay. The rebellion set estates and plantations to flame and was the start of a broader political push toward emancipation.[3] Retribution was quickly sought by British leaders and many were hanged for their attempts at revolt; the leader of the revolt, Samuel Sharpe, was hanged there in 1832. Recognition was later given, and Sharpe was proclaimed a national hero of Jamaica in 1975, and the main square of the town was renamed in his honor. Eventually, Jamaica was emancipated on August 1, 1834 which granted all new children born or children under the age of six "free", but held individuals outside of that parameter to be apprentices and work forty hours a week in compensation to their previous or original owners. It was not until four years after these restrictions were put in place that all slave and apprentices were given the status of full freedom.[5] After the half decade emancipation process, Montego Bay and its sugar cane industry took a hit. Therefore, it branched out and took root in expanding into exporting bananas and coffee as well.[3]
Montego Bay's city status prior to British rule was debated; however, it had its city status revoked during Jamaica's British colonial period. It was re-proclaimed a city by act of parliament in 1980, but this has not meant that it has acquired any form of autonomy, for it continues to be an integral part of the parish of St. James.[6]
Today, Montego Bay is known for Cornwall Regional Hospital, port facilities, second homes for numerous upper-class Jamaicans from Kingston as well as North Americans and Europeans, fine restaurants, vibrant night life and shopping. The coastland near Montego Bay is occupied by numerous tourist resorts, most newly built, some occupying the grounds of old sugarcane plantations with some of the original buildings and mill-works still standing. The most famous is the White Witch's Rose Hall which features a world-class golf course.
The infrastructure of the city is going through a series of modernizations which once completed, aims to keep Montego Bay as a top destination in the region. The Montego Bay Convention Centre, built on a large site near to the Rose Hall estate, was opened by Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding on 7 January 2011.[7]
Demographics
The majority of the city's population is of African descent. The city is also home to sizeable minority ethnic groups such as the East Indians and Chinese, who came to the country as indentured servants in the mid-to-late 19th century. The Chinese especially occupy important roles in the city's economy especially in retail where Downtown Montego Bay is home to many shops and supermarkets owned by Chinese immigrants. The city's East Indian population also play a key role as they operate many gift and jewelry shops in the city which are mostly geared to tourists.[8]
There is a minority of Europeans, some descending from immigrants from Germany (the city is a 90-minute drive from German settlements such as German Town in Westmoreland) and Great Britain (who own most of the land in the city from as far back as the days of the slave trade).
The city is home to many immigrants from Hispanic countries such as Mexico, Cuba and Spain as well as many French, Russians and Italians (who mostly own homes or beachfront properties in the area).
The city also is home to many Americans and Canadians, who work the tourism or business process outsourcing (BPO) industries.
Montego Bay is pivotal to Jamaica's economy. The city holds most of the weight of the country's tourism sector. Most of the country's visitors arrive and depart from Montego Bay's airport or port. Many international companies have resorts in the city including Hyatt, Hilton Hotels, Holiday Inn, RIU Hotels, Royalton and Iberostar. The city is the home to the headquarters of international resort chain Sandals. The Government of Jamaica, through the Ministry of Tourism, has begun to focus on bolstering the city's entertainment and gastronomic offerings. Though the city's airport hosts a number international chains, the city itself does not have access to these restaurants. The city has become home to Usain Bolt's Tracks and Records restaurant and became home to Starbucks' first Jamaican location, at Doctor's Cave Beach, in November 2017.[9] The city also serves as the Head Office for Starbucks' operations in Jamaica.
National Commercial Bank's branch in Sam Sharpe Square, bordered by Union Street, St. James Street, and Corner Lane.
The city hosts many financial institutions such as Scotiabank, FCIB, National Commercial Bank, Jamaica National Commercial Bank (JN Bank) and many others. The city also has offices for many auditing firms such as KPMG and PwC.
The city is home to many health institutions such as the Cornwall Regional Hospital as well as the recently opened, Hospiten, a Spanish-owned, private hospital located in Rose Hall.
Education in the city can be found from Pre-K up to Tertiary. The city has many Pre-K and Basic Schools. Beyond this, the city has many Primary and Preparatory Schools. Secondary Education is also provided in the city most notable of which are the Montego Bay High School for Girls, Mount Alvernia High School—a Roman Catholic High School for Girls which shares the same crest, motto and wears a uniform similar to that of sister school of Immaculate Conception High School in Kingston, Herbert Morrison Technical High School and the oldest school in the city, Cornwall College, an all-boys' school.
Tertiary Institutions in the city are namely the University of West Indies (UWI) – Western Jamaica Campus, The University of Technology (UTECH) Montego Bay Campus, Sam Sharpe Teachers' College (SSTC) and the Montego Bay Community College (MBCC). Most tertiary institutions in the city are accredited.
Transport
Roads
The North Coast Highway runs through the city of Montego Bay, with 2 lanes in each direction within the city, terminating at the Queen's Drive and resuming at the intersection of the Alice Eldemire Drive and Barnett Street.[10] The North Coast Highway connects Montego Bay with the North-South section of Highway 2000 (called T3), which begins at Mammee Bay in Ocho Rios, St. Ann and terminates at an interchange which leads onto the Mandela Highway in St. Catherine and into the nation's capital, Kingston.[11]
Another major road within the city is the B15 (Montego Bay to Falmouth) road.[12] The city is also well served by buses, mini-busses and taxis, which operate from the Montego Bay Transport Centre.[13]
The Government of Jamaica announced that a tolled bypass to the city has been planned to be built in order to reduce traffic congestion and travel times. The bypass is to begin at Westgate and end at Ironshore. The bypass is expected to cost around USD $200 Million.[14]
Montego Bay is served by Jamaica's largest airport, the Sangster International Airport. The airport has the distinction of being the busiest airport in the English-speaking Caribbean, serving 4.3 million passengers in 2017.[17]
The airport was the hub of Jamaica's former national airline Air Jamaica.[18] The airline also had its reservations, Western Jamaica sales & ticketing office, as well as its vacations division in the city until its purchase by Caribbean Airlines in 2011, when they moved their offices to Kingston. The site is now the headquarters for Island Routes, a company owned by the Sandals-ATL Group, which in the past was affiliated with the airline.
The airport is served by several North American and European airlines, connecting the island with the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and South America. The southern U.S. city of Miami can be reached within 70 minutes. The southern U.S. cities of Charlotte, Houston, Atlanta and Tampa can be reached by non-stop flights in less than three hours. Other locations like Philadelphia, New York City, Toronto, Washington, D.C., and Montreal can be reached in under four hours. The airport is also one of two airports in the Caribbean (other being Havana), that has a non-stop flight to Los Angeles, allowing passengers the ability to connect to flights to Asia, Australia and Oceania. The airport has undergone major expansion since 2003, and has won awards including the coveted World Travel Award for being the Caribbean's Leading Airport, beating airports like Punta Cana International Airport and Grantley Adams International Airport.[19]
Port
There is a free port and cruise line terminal on a man-made peninsula jutting into the bay.
Communications
Fixed voice and broadband
Fixed voice and broadband services in Montego Bay is provided by FLOW. FLOW uses a Hybrid Fibre and Coaxial network to provide IPTV, VoIP & POTS and cable broadband capable of speeds up to 100Mbit/s. FLOW also uses a Copper network to provide POTS and ADSL capable of speeds up to 12Mbit/s. This copper network is currently being upgraded to VDSL2, which may allow speeds of over 50 Mbit/s over existing copper lines as well as provide a migration path for the provider to Fibre to the Home.[citation needed] FLOW also has a fibre-optic network in the neighbourhood of Rhyne Park which provides up to 100Mbit/s as well. There are several other small cable companies such as Cornwall Communications, that provides cable broadband and voice over its cable network; however, they are vastly incomparable in subscriber numbers to FLOW.[original research?][citation needed]
Mobile voice and broadband
Mobile voice and broadband services in Montego Bay is dominated by both incumbents, FLOW & Digicel. Both carriers provide GSM, EDGE, 3G HSPA & HSPA+ connectivity in and around the city.
Currently,[when?]FLOW offers HSPA+ of up to 21Mbit/s on 850MHz and 1900MHz with speeds of up to 21Mbit/s. FLOW also offers LTE data in Montego Bay. The company is the currently the only carrier to provide comprehensive LTE coverage within the city itself. Coverage also extends out towards to the adjoining rural areas surrounding Montego Bay such as Liliput to east and Hopewell (in the parish of Hanover) to the west. FLOW's LTE network uses LTE Band 4, commonly known as AWS.[20] Users can avail themselves of speeds of up to 150 Mbit/s down and 50 Mbit/s up. In some areas in the city, FLOW subscribers are able to access LTE Advanced with speeds up to 225Mbit/s; making Montego Bay the only city in Jamaica to have access to such.
Digicel, Jamaica's larger mobile network, also offers 21Mbit/s HSPA+; however, they also offer DC-HSDPA (commonly known as DC-HSPA+) allowing capable devices speeds of up to 42Mbit/s on paired 850MHz spectrum. Digicel's LTE network is also available in Montego Bay, owing to its commitment to provide an islandwide LTE network, offering LTE in the city for its subscribers. The network is theoretically capable of speeds up to 75Mbit/s on 10MHz of Band 17 spectrum.
In popular culture
The city was the subject of a namesake song by Bobby Bloom in 1970, which became a Top Ten hit in the United States for Bloom. It was covered by Jon Stevens in 1980 and by Amazulu in 1986, becoming minor hits for both.
Montego Bay was featured in the song Santechnikas iš Ukmergės by Lithuanian singer Vytautas Kernagis.
Climate
Montego Bay has a tropical monsoon climate (Köppen climate classificationAm), with a wet season and a drier season and the temperature being warm or hot year-round. The average annual high temperature is 29.8°C (85.6°F), while the average annual low temperature is 23.7°C (74.7°F). The hottest time of year is from June to September. August has the highest average high at 31.4°C (88.5°F). July and August have the highest average low at 24.8°C (76.6°F). January and February have the lowest average high at 27.9°C (82.2°F). February has the lowest average low at 22.1°C (71.8°F).
Montego Bay receives 1,140 millimetres (45in) of rain over 127 precipitation days, with wetter and drier months. The dry season is fairly short, lasting from January to April. July also sees a dip in precipitation. October, the wettest month, receives 164 millimetres (6.5in) of rainfall over 14 precipitation days on average. Humidity remains consistently high year-round. Montego Bay receives 2788 hours of sunshine annually (7.6 hours per day) on average, with the sunshine being distributed fairly evenly across the year.
Jamaica is an island country in the Caribbean Sea and the West Indies. At 10,990 square kilometres (4,240 sq mi), it is the third-largest island—after Cuba and Hispaniola—of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean. Jamaica lies about 145 km (78 nmi) south of Cuba, 191 km (103 nmi) west of Hispaniola, and 215 km (116 nmi) southeast of the Cayman Islands.
Telecommunications in Jamaica include the fixed and mobile telephone networks, radio, television, and the Internet.
Transport in Jamaica consists of roadways, railways, ship and air transport, with roadways forming the backbone of the island's internal transport system.
The telecommunication systems in Vanuatu provides voice and data services to the island nation.
Kingston is the capital and largest city of Jamaica, located on the southeastern coast of the island. It faces a natural harbour protected by the Palisadoes, a long sand spit which connects the town of Port Royal and the Norman Manley International Airport to the rest of the island. Kingston is the largest English-speaking city south of the United States in the Western Hemisphere.
Air Jamaica was the flag carrier of Jamaica. It was owned and operated by Caribbean Airlines from May 2011 until the cessation of operations in 2015. Caribbean Airlines Limited, headquartered in Piarco, Trinidad and Tobago, had administrative offices for Air Jamaica located at Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston, Jamaica.
Bell Mobility Inc. is a Canadian wireless network operator and the division of Bell Canada which offers wireless services across Canada. It operates networks using LTE and HSPA+ on its mainstream networks. Bell Mobility is the third-largest wireless carrier in Canada, with 10.1 million subscribers as of Q3 2020.
4G is the fourth generation of cellular network technology, succeeding 3G and designed to support all-IP communications and broadband services, enabling a variety of data-intensive applications. A 4G system must meet the performance requirements defined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in IMT Advanced. 4G supports a range of applications, including enhanced mobile internet access, high-definition streaming, IP telephony, video conferencing, and the expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
StarHub Limited, commonly known as StarHub, is a Singaporean multinational telecommunications conglomerate and one of the major telcos operating in the country. Founded in 1998, it is listed on the Singapore Exchange (SGX).
WiBro is a wireless broadband Internet technology developed by the South Korean telecoms industry. WiBro is the South Korean service name for IEEE 802.16e international standard. By the end of 2012, the Korean Communications Commission intends to increase WiBro broadband connection speeds to 10 Mbit/s, around ten times the 2009 speed, which will complement their 1 Gbit/s fibre-optic network. The WiBro networks were shut down at the end of 2018.
Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago Limited is a large telephone and Internet service provider in Trinidad and Tobago. The company, which is jointly owned by the Government of Trinidad and Tobago and Cable & Wireless Communications, was formed out of a merger of Telco and Textel. TSTT no longer holds a monopoly in fixed-line telephone services due to FLOW introducing a fixed-line service of their own, and their cellular monopoly was broken in June 2005 when licenses were granted to Digicel and Laqtel.
Sri Lanka Telecom PLC, doing business as SLT-MOBITEL, is the national telecommunications services provider in Sri Lanka and one of the country's largest companies with an annual turnover in excess of Rs 40 billion. The company provides domestic and corporate services which include fixed and wireless telephony, Internet access and IT services to domestic, public and business sector customers. As of 2018 SLT-MOBITEL was Sri Lanka's second largest mobile network operator with over 7.9 million subscribers.
High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) is an amalgamation of two mobile protocols—High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA)—that extends and improves the performance of existing 3G mobile telecommunication networks using the WCDMA protocols. A further-improved 3GPP standard called Evolved High Speed Packet Access was released late in 2008, with subsequent worldwide adoption beginning in 2010. The newer standard allows bit rates to reach as high as 337 Mbit/s in the downlink and 34 Mbit/s in the uplink; however, these speeds are rarely achieved in practice.
Evolved High Speed Packet Access, HSPA+, HSPA (Plus) or HSPAP, is a technical standard for wireless broadband telecommunication. It is the second phase of HSPA which has been introduced in 3GPP release 7 and being further improved in later 3GPP releases. HSPA+ can achieve data rates of up to 42.2 Mbit/s. It introduces antenna array technologies such as beamforming and multiple-input multiple-output communications (MIMO). Beamforming focuses the transmitted power of an antenna in a beam toward the user's direction. MIMO uses multiple antennas on the sending and receiving side. Further releases of the standard have introduced dual carrier operation, i.e. the simultaneous use of two 5 MHz carriers. HSPA+ is an evolution of HSPA that upgrades the existing 3G network and provides a method for telecom operators to migrate towards 4G speeds that are more comparable to the initially available speeds of newer LTE networks without deploying a new radio interface. HSPA+ should not be confused with LTE though, which uses an air interface based on orthogonal frequency-division modulation and multiple access.
Internet in Moldova is one of the fastest and least expensive in the world. The country ranks 3rd in the world by gigabit coverage with around 90% of the population having the option to subscribe to a gigabit plan. The overall infrastructure is well developed which allows many users to experience good quality services throughout the country. However, despite high speeds and cheap prices, the penetration level is quite low when compared with many EU or CIS countries. In 2018, 49% of Moldovan households had broadband access. In 2015, there were 80 registered Internet Service Provider's (ISP's) in the country, with the majority being local or regional with only a few offering their services throughout the country. Moldtelecom and StarNet are the country's leading providers sharing around 88% of the market. The remaining 12% are shared between other ISPS, like SunCommunications, Arax Communications and others. Almost all ISPs that offer their services across the country have their headquarters located in the capital-city of Chişinău.
bmobile is a Mobile Phone, Home Security provider, and fixed wireless provider of Trinidad and Tobago, operating as a division of TSTT.
In Romania, there are 18.8 million connections to the Internet. Romania's country code is .ro. The .eu domain is also used, as it is shared with other European Union member states. There were over 600 000 domains registered under .ro at the end of 2012.
Jamaica Air Shuttle was a domestic and western Caribbean regional airline based at the Tinson Pen Aerodrome in Kingston, Jamaica. The airline began service on 7 December 2009, offering "on-demand" scheduled and private charter services to Jamaica's international and domestic airports.
Flow is a trade name of the Caribbean former telecommunications provider Cable & Wireless Communications used to market cable television, internet, telephone, and wireless services. Flow also replaced the UTS brand in the Dutch and French Caribbean, following their acquisition of United Telecommunications Service (UTS).
↑ "Klimatafel von Montego Bay / Jamaika"(PDF). Baseline climate means (1961-1990) from stations all over the world (in German). Deutscher Wetterdienst. Retrieved 7 September 2016.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Montego Bay.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
Jamaica 
