BELIZE CITY, Belize -- Montego Bay, Jamaica, will host the next regional gathering of the Caribbean Network Operators Group (CaribNOG) from April 19 to 24, 2016.

Stephen Lee, programme director of CaribNOG, made the announcement at its tenth regional meeting in Belize City.

“Jamaica is the perfect location for CaribNOG 11 because of its demonstrated capacity for innovation and its clear commitment to regional development,” Lee said.

CaribNOG is a Caribbean, independent, volunteer-based community that promotes the education and training of the region’s technology users.

Since its first event in St Maarten in 2010, CaribNOG’s conferences have become an influential forum for the region’s network engineers to work together in support of Caribbean Internet infrastructure development.

Bevil Wooding, an internet strategist with Packet Clearing House and one of the founders of CaribNOG, described the 2016 event as “an important gathering place for anyone interested in the establishment and evolution Caribbean region’s Internet economy.”

CaribNOG has become one of the most highly anticipated events on the regional tech calendar, and several major local, regional and international industry players are expected to take part in Montego Bay next year.

Martin Hannigan, director of networks and data center architecture at Akamai Technologies, said Akamai would take part in CaribNOG 11. He said he expected the meeting to be CaribNOG’s largest ever.

“I’ve been to either five or six CaribNOG events, and each event gets bigger and larger and more noticed and more interesting,” Hannigan said.

“Event location matters and having the next event in Jamaica will make a difference. Jamaica has a population of about three million, so I would expect 100 or more people to show up to the event,” he said.

More than 70 technology professionals from the private sector, civil society, academia, regional governments and the international technical community took part in CaribNOG10 from November 2 to 6.

The regional event had the full support of international players such as Microsoft, Google, Akamai, the Caribbean Telecommunications Union, the Internet Society, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.