GUYANA: Telephone Sex System Comes Under a Microscope

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Bert Wilkinson

GEORGETOWN, Oct 3 1996 (IPS) - A simmering row between the government and a U.S. owned telephone company over the latter’s participation in an international telephone sex system could end with the phone company being given the marching orders.

Over the last five years, the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph company (GT&T) has been raking in millions of dollars from its share in this service. Officials have even argued that without revenues from this source, they would not be able to sustain the extremely low rates to local subscribers.

But now government has handed the GT&T an ultimatum — it must either close the shutters on this aspect of its business and turn its attention to expanding and modernising services to the Guyanese people or pull out.

The Cheddi Jagan administration’s intolerance with the company reached its peak last week following a Washington Post report naming the company as one of the bigger players in the erotic industry.

The President was further incensed when he learned that the company expects to earn some 100 million dollars from the sex industry this year, but is demanding an increase of some 186 percent in domestic rates.

The two parties are also at odds over whether or not 8,000 outlets used for international incoming circuits are actual telephone lines and should be made available to Guyanese waiting in line for a telephone to be installed in their homes or just that — circuits.

Just one in 14 Guyanese in the capital Georgetown has the use of the service in their homes, while in the interior there are no telephones.

And the company’s executives are also lashing out at government officials, whom they say are bent on making life difficult for them.

“We have stated and re-stated that we do not use lines. The audio text service uses international circuits. This idea about lines being freed up to be used by subscribers does not make a whole lot of sense,” says Deputy General Manager Terry Holder.

This is how the system operates. Subscribers in the United States or Europe, are handed a number bearing Guyana’s 592-2 country code. They place the call from their home countries and it is routed through this South American country and re-sent to the place of origin — a way of getting around laws against these systems in other countries.

The GT&T then gets a share of the revenue from a switching service offered by communications giants such as AT&T, MCI and Sprint.

But Jagan, since being at the helm of government in 1992, has made little effort to hide the fact that he would prefer the company to pack up and leave. He has always been suspicious of its operations and says the deal made with his predecessors was “clouded in corruption.”

He has now gone as far as to threaten to give the company the marching orders and to call in “four or five other western companies to buy out the company.”

“There is a lot of nonsense going on in this country and this is one example of a company which we don’t want in Guyana,” says Jagan.

But based on the agreement with the previous administration in 1991, the firm has a monopoly on telephone services for at least 20 years.