Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo yesterday announced that the PPP/C government is hopeful of ending the three-decade monopoly of the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph (GTT) on international voice and data transmissions by next week, thereby delivering on the long promised liberalisation of the telecommunications sector.
“Liberalisation is a promise that we made a long time ago. Both parties agreed to this and we need to get it implemented. We are hoping by next week that could happen but we had to go through a tonne of technical work doing that,” Jagdeo told a news conference yesterday at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre. “That sets the basis for 5G services, improvements in cell services, more competition, allowing more fibre optic to come. It sets up the basis for an ICT platform [through] which we want to create thousands of jobs…,” he added.
This would pave the way for cellular services provider Digicel to land its own fibre optic cable and for the expansion of services of E-Networks, which has landed a subsea cable and has set up a substation. GTT has raised concerns over the laying of the E-Networks cable, which it maintained was done without the necessary approvals.
In 1990, the then PNC government granted GTT’s parent company, Atlantic Tele Network a 20-year monopoly over telecommunications, with a crucial aspect being the control of the international gateway. This has been a major bone of contention between GTT and its mobile services competitor here, Digicel. For years, Digicel has pressed successive administrations, including Jagdeo’s, for an end to the GTT monopoly and in January of this year publicised a petition calling for the liberalisation of the telecoms sector here.
While legislation ending the telephone monopoly was passed in July 2016 and assented to by then President David Granger, there is still no activation as it required the issuance of a commencement order by the subject minister.
Jagdeo blasted former Telecommuni-cations Minister Cathy Hughes for failing in this regard.
In March last year, the then government and GTT signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) liberalisation, which included an agreement to continue talks on all outstanding issues with the objective of reaching a binding settlement.
Meanwhile, the Guyana Revenue Authority and GTT are still to settle an outstanding tax issue, which had also been previously cited as being responsible for the delay in the liberalisation. However, Jagdeo maintained that liberalisation does not depend on any agreement on taxes. “The law was passed already. So the tax matters will have to be discussed but this liberalisation is not dependent… on a settlement there. If that’s the case, then GTT can always say ‘We never reached a settlement with you,’ then you can never [have] liberalization. So that is not a condition for liberalization—reaching an agreement on the tax matter,” he said.
