The Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) on Monday fired back at the Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority (URCA) saying that any suggestion that the company’s behaviour at any time has in some way been anti-competitive is “misplaced at best.”
Last week, URCA blamed the phone company for the three-month delay in implementing number portability.
The new service would allow consumers to switch telephone providers, but still keep their same number.
BTC had proposed that customers be charged for switching to other providers.
URCA said such a proposal would work against consumers’ interests because it would create high barriers to switching providers while keeping their existing numbers.
The regulator intervened after BTC and Cable Bahamas were unable to agree on how to share the costs associated with implementing number portability.
In a press release yesterday, BTC’s Senior Manager for Public Relations Jerome Sawyer said BTC embraces competition as a means to providing better service and more competitive pricing for consumers and it sees number portability as a part of that business model for The Bahamas.
He added that URCA knew well in advance about the company’s concerns.
“On September 2 BTC submitted the preliminary determination to URCA laying out the company’s concerns with the number portability process and its management,” he said.
“URCA was aware of the realities of the labour environment and constraints facing the company that were impacting delivery of Next Generation Network (NGN) and ultimately number portability. BTC has been frank in its disclosures to URCA and always brought concerns to the regulator as soon as it could.”
Mr. Sawyer added that as early as March, BTC advised URCA of its intention to port first, those customers who had already transferred to the new and faster NGN network.
“This certainly wasn’t meant in any way to be anti-competitive,” he said.
“Our plea to URCA at the time was to implement the number portability programme firstly to those customers already on the NGN platform; and as we moved customers off the old BaTelCo network onto NGN, they in turn would also have access to number portability. We are still of the opinion that this is the most sensible and efficient manner to serve customers wanting to make use of number portability. We do not agree that this is anti-competitive but just good business sense for everyone.”
Mr. Sawyer insists that BTC will continue to connect our competitor’s customers every month to the best broadband packages in the market.
