COMMUNICATIONS-GUYANA: Longing to Keep in Touch

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Bert Wilkinson

GEORGETOWN, Sep 16 2000 (IPS) - Maybe if it had not happened to President Bharrat Jagdeo there would not be such an urgency to solving the problem. But last week, while the Guyanese president was attending the UN Millennium Summit in New York, he got a first hand demonstration of just how difficult it has become to contact Guyana by telephone.

This week, Prime Minister Samuel Hinds wrote the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) asking it to deal with the complaints subscribers have been making all year. Since New Year’s Day telephone subscribers, Guyanese living overseas and investors have complained bitterly to the administration that it is virtually impossible to call Guyana from the United States, Canada and parts of Europe.

“We would take appropriate action as the need for a government role becomes evident,” said Hinds in a missive to the watchdog PUC.

“We hope that the PUC would arrive at positions and decisions which are fair to both the consumers and to GT&T in balancing short, medium and long-term interests,” Hinds noted.

GT&T, the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company, 80 percent owned by the US Virgin Islands-based Atlantic Tele Network (ATN), has acknowledged that there is a problem connecting with Guyana and blames it on an accounting rates row with fellow US telecommunications firm AT&T.

The problem began to affect the public at the beginning of the year when AT&T formally ended its long distance-carrying arrangement with the local company.

Both AT&T and GT&T are blaming each other for cutting off circuits to Guyana.

“We are still not sure why people aren’t getting through because we have since tied up alternative arrangements with Sprint and MCI. We thought that would have eased the situation. We are concerned because incoming calls are the bread and butter of the company’s revenues,” said GT&T spokesman Lennox Cornette.

The situation is threatening to return the country to the early 1980s when the telephone system was close to collapse, with only 13,000 working lines. Today, thanks to ATN’s buying 80 percent of the firm in 1991, there are about 80,000 working lines serving a population of 750,000.

But with the current inability to connect with Guyana, resentment over ATN’s 20-year monopoly license, and practices that consumers say are unfair, the US company is not seen as the saviour of the Guyanese telecommunications system.

The company has begun to spruce up its image. It has abandoned its previous practice of blocking free Internet calls, it has announced it will pay out one million dollars in government shareholders’ dividends – the first such pay-out in its decade of operations here – and it has also said it is willing to discuss ending its monopoly, as long as the terms do not prove disadvantageous to its interests.

ATN this week also took out full page advertisements in local dailies trying to explain why it is that Guyana seems to have fallen off the world’s telecommunications map.

“Attempts by GT&T to avoid service disruption and customer inconvenience seem to have proven futile as we continue to receive reports of inconvenience despite special arrangements with other international carriers like MCI and Sprint,” the firm said in one of its ads.

Most people calling Guyana are AT&T customers and so they are the ones most put out, the ads say.

In the meantime, Guyanese with Internet-ready computers are making the most of free calls to the US. Many small firms have sprung up in the city charging about five US dollars per hour for calls to relatives and friends.

The few who have successfully completed calls through other carriers have a different thing to complain about: the rates are horrendously expensive.