The Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GT&T) is moving to put new measures in place in an effort to reduce the number of land-line telephone services being surrendered by low-income persons who find it difficult to afford retention of the service, according to the Company’s Director of Consumer Affairs, Pamela Briggs.
Briggs told Stabroek Business that low-income persons, particularly in the south Georgetown area, were surrendering land line services at the rate of around 500 per month and that in some cases the service was being retained for as little as three months. She conceded that the high cost of living in Guyana had resulted in a stricter prioritizing of expenditure. “The reality is that consumer necessities like rents and food are higher in people’s scale of priorities, and that is entirely understandable,” Briggs said.
According to Briggs GT&T had taken initiatives in the past to help consumers manage their telephone expenditure and would continue to do so in order to ensure service retention. Those measures include pre-paid services including the use of pre-paid phone cards.
Briggs told Stabroek Business that the irony of the high rate of surrendering of services was that GT&T has invested considerable sums in providing infrastructure to enable access to land lines by low income persons. She said that the surrendering of services amounted to a loss of investment for the company.
Briggs alluded to the possibility that GT&T may recommence provision of public land line services despite the view expressed by the company that these services have, in the past, been vandalized by entities that have taken commercial advantage of the absence of a public telephone facility.
Briggs disclosed that GT&T was currently owed “billions of dollars” in unpaid bills and that it was unlikely that much of this would be collected.
GT&T has a target of providing 10,000 new telephone lines annually. Up to October this year it had provided 9,367 new services and completed 11,372 installations – including some ‘rolled over’ from last year. She said that while the company currently had a ‘waiting list’ of around 60,000 persons, the accuracy of the list needed to be verified.
