After officially launching in November of last year, the country’s newest telecommunications provider Aliv is up to 60,000 subscribers and growing.
Aliv’s CEO Damian Blackburn revealed this information yesterday while appearing as a guest on the Love 97’s daily talk show Issues of the Day.
“We’re up to 60,000 customers now. When we started the market consisted of the one player, who reported between 300-320,000 subscribers consistently over the last few years.
“So obviously with 60,000 we’re 20 percent of that number,” Mr. Blackburn said.
While much has been made of Aliv’s arrival and its competition with the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC), ending the monopoly BTC has long held in the country, Mr. Blackburn said despite the two companies being rivals on the surface, they still have to maintain a working relationship.
“We had to agree on an interconnect agreement so that calls could flow between ALIV and BTC before we actually launched, and URCA (Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority) has certain rules that both parties have to follow when you make such an agreement.
“We also signed an agreement with BTC in the middle of April to utilize their tower infrastructure in a number of places and as we rollout to other islands, we are coordinating with BTC about using their infrastructure and the reason we’re doing this to have the great quality of the Aliv mobile network essentially correlating on their site,” Mr. Blackburn said.
Having ended BTC’s long-standing mobile monopoly, the new entrant is now targeting a gross subscriber figure of 73,662 by end-June 2017, an almost 50 percent increase from where it is now, with average subscriber numbers projected to be 61,831.
However, Aliv’s subscriber claims have already provoked a sharp reaction from BTC, which has served notice it will not take competition lying down, and intends to push back hard via creative consumer plans of its own.
Leon Williams, BTC’s CEO, last month said it was impossible for Aliv’s claimed 45,000-50,000 subscribers to equate to one-quarter of the market, given that the incumbent operator has more than 320,000 customers.
URCA revealed over the weekend that it is satisfied that both providers namely BTC and ALIV, are actively working to ensure that ‘kinks’ in the system in regards to mobile number portability are resolved as quickly as possible.
Mobile number portability (np) enables persons to keep their telephone number(s) when switching providers and was made possible following the introduction of cellular mobile competition.
