Digicel and Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GT&T) subscribers will finally be able to interconnect via Short Messaging Service (SMS) from next month.

A joint release issued yesterday said “Digicel and GT&T are pleased to announce that they have come to an agreement to enable cross-network mobile texting in Guyana”

“Customers of each network will from June 1st, 2009, for the first time, be able to text customers of the other network”, the brief release added.

The issue has been contentious and one which Digicel had been plugging for a long time. GT&T had indicated its willingness to facilitate the move but reportedly had some concerns it wanted to iron out. A senior official within GT&T had said that the agreement was something that the company stood to benefit significantly from but stated that there were issues that had not been properly addressed.

When Stabroek News contacted GT&T Public Relations Officer Allison Parker yesterday on the suddenness of the agreement, she declined to comment.

Digicel’s Public Relations Officer Alex Graham told this newspaper that the company was looking to put a release out on the issue but up to press time this release had not been received.

In February, Digicel Chief Executive Officer Gregory Dean told Stabroek Business that his company had found the process of negotiating an interconnection agreement with GT&T “frustrating” and accused GT&T of creating needless hurdles for providing what he called a “basic service”.

He said that as a result of the response of GT&T, his company had consequently decided to set aside an existing draft SMS agreement and seek to address all interconnection (both voice and text) issues with GT&T through a single process. “We are now going to be saying to GT&T that these are all the issues that we have in relation to interconnection and this is how we propose to solve them,” Dean had said.

Dean explained that an understanding between the two companies on the desirability of an SMS agreement had been arrived at more than a year ago.

He said that at that time both sides had said that they needed time “to be technically prepared” for interconnection.   In May last year both parties indicated their technical readiness, tests were done and it was established that the system worked, he said.

The CEO disclosed that GT&T then drafted an amendment to the current interconnection agreement dealing with voice traffic which agreement had gone “back and forth” between the two parties to make changes and adjustments.

The CEO said that in December, GT&T sought clarification of some of the changes which DIGICEL had made to the agreement and indicated that it wished to include a further “five or six items” of its own.

”We spent two weeks on the agreement after which we told GT&T that we accepted all of their changes,” He said that after the contract was returned to GT&T that company then said that their lawyers were busy.

Dean said that DIGICEL then told GT&T that it believed that the issue was a simple one and that the company wished to be notified as to whether or not GT&T really wanted an SMS interconnection agreement.

The agreement comes a week after Digicel filed a lawsuit to challenge GT&T’s monopoly on international traffic to and from Guyana.