Bahamas News

The Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) plans to soon restructure its rates as it prepares for privatization.

According to BTC’s Vice President for Marketing, Sales and Business Development, Marlon Johnson, starting next year, the government owned telephone company will reduce its rates, in a bid to allow thousands of its subscribers to “do more and get more value for money.”

“We recognize that we are moving into a privatized environment, a liberalized environment,” Mr. Johnson told the Bahama Journal.

“We have to ensure that the company operates and gives the kinds of incentives, features and functionality that customers expect in a privatized market.”

The road to privatize BTC has been a long one, dating as far back as the first Ingraham Administration.

It continued under the Christie Administration, which had announced that it had shaved the list of prospective buyers down to three, but in the end the administration decided that none of the offers was satisfactory.

At the end of 2003, the first attempt at privatizing BTC came to an end.

Perry Christie, who was prime minister at the time, assured that his government was still committed to the process.

Since returning to office, Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham has continuously renewed his government’s commitment to privatize BTC during the 2008/2009 fiscal year.

In a recent interview with the Journal, Minister of State for Finance Zhivargo Laing revealed that the team negotiating with BlueWater Communications for the privatization of BTC had another 14 days of talks with the prospective buyers.

According to Minister Laing, members of the negotiation committee were engaging a consultant to assist them in their technical assessment of the offers.

He said that process was expected to conclude by the end of the month and that talks with BlueWater were expected to accelerate following that.

In preparation for the transition, BTC has committed itself to pumping more than $40 million into “significantly” upgrading its GSM network across the country to improve its coverage and capacity.

It’s part of the company’s plan to migrate all of its 80,000 TDMA customers in New Providence and the Family Islands to the GSM platform before the end of the year.

“We have been very, very pleased with the progress so far. About 6,000 post paid TDMA customers who have switched over to GSM have been allowed to keep their numbers. Next month, we will be introducing the same sort of number portability for prepaid customers,” Mr. Johnson said.

“Starting the end of July, the middle of August, we will begin turning down the TDMA cell sites in the Family Islands as we complete our GSM overlay in those islands.”

BTC officials are hoping that by the end of October, the company would have completed turning down the TDMA system throughout the entire country as well as its A50 mega-hertz overlay.

“This would bring our GSM on par with what has happened with the TDMA,” Mr. Johnson explained.

BTC recently introduced additional minutes with the purchase of phone cards valued at $20 phone cards.

“We realize that times are hard and so we wanted to do more for our customers. We want to reward those who spend more to get more,” Mr. Johnson said.

“…Towards the end of the summer, we are going to introduce for all our post-paid GSM customers, the MMS, which allows you to send picture to picture on cell phones and browse the Internet.”

Source: Bahama Journal