While former prime minister Hubert Ingraham was claiming his government invested heavily in a modern digital economy, Bahamas
Telecommunications Co. was placing an immediate moratorium on connection of new cell service.
Mr. Ingraham told the House of Assembly during the e-commerce debate Wednesday that the Free National Movement sought to ensure each community has access to communications before state-owned Batelco is sold.
According to Batelco president and chief executive officer Michael Symonette: “Our TDMA Cellular network has reached near capacity resulting in frequent call drop-offs and less than acceptable levels of toll quality voice services.
“In our desire to ensure that our current customers have proper and adequate cellular services, we have decided to proactively put a moratorium on new subscriber connections for the foreseeable future.”
The company has more than 108,000 active subscribers, more than a third of the population of The Bahamas. Of that number, 56,000 are active QuikCell customers.
Mr. Symonette said extensive plans are under way to upgrade the entire cellular network platform, significantly increasing system capacity, and improving the level of service .
“This is a unique situation caused greatly by our overall success with both the prepaid and post paid cellular lines-of-business. The company has experienced growth in this area in excess of 100 per cent per year over the past several years.
“We are victims of our own success.”
Mr. Symonette said it is going to causes difficulties for the company, its distributors and “most importantly” customers.
“We have this issue as our No. 1 priority and hope to be able to make additional announcements in the coming weeks,” he said.
Vice-president of sales and marketing Alfred Phillips said the company recognises the moratorium will cause short-term inconvenience to BTC’s distributors and resellers.
He said the company will make every effort to ensure there is no “real loss” of revenues to them.
“We have informed them that we will buy back all of their current QuikCell inventory (phone-in-the-box or QuikCell numbers) immediately so as not to have them in a position of carrying inventory and not being able to sell it,” Mr. Phillips said. “Of course, they will continue to sell QuikCell Prepaid Cards to those customers who currently have phones.”
By Lindsay Thompson, The Nassau Guardian
