Is GT&T holding this nation to ransom?

May 28, 2013 Letters

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Dear Editor,
So GT&T decided to change its billing system (obviously a boardroom decision) with a claim that it will improve its service delivery. Oh please!
It has been almost 2 months since this so-called upgrade is in progress, in the meantime GT&T has seemingly been using its monopoly position to hold the entire nation to ransom. For the longest while applications for telephone service transfers are not being processed and applications for change of DSL plan are not being processed, without care for how it affects the rest of Guyana. ‘Emagine’ that.
To add salt to the wound there is a certain pomposity and disdain with which the customer service reps treat with the public. Customers are being told these services are not being processed at the moment, and GT&T has no idea how long the wait will last, but customers must understand and abide while GT&T takes its own sweet time.
One would expect that when a project is undertaken, the time required for all processes are estimated and made known to all affected parties so that they too can plan their own processes. Isn’t this basic commonsense? It aptly demonstrates the contempt GT&T has for the Guyanese public; the whole nation must sit and wait indefinitely without the courtesy of being given an estimate of when the travail will end. Or is it executive boardroom incompetence that a vacuity of project management skills exists therein?
If GT&T claims that it values its customers and there is no deliberate policy to treat the Guyanese public with contempt, then there is need for severe executive house cleaning; the CEO, Technical and Customer Service Directors should be among the first casualties.
Elementary project management will inform that for example, if there are 1000 customers on the old billing platform and it takes 1 day for one worker to transfer 10 customers to the new platform and 10 workers are utilized it will take 10 days to move all customers. I therefore find it puzzling that the executives and staff of GT&T have no clue when they expect this service disruption to end.
Further, GT&T is processing disconnections and terminations of both landline and DSL service; it is also processing new connections. It defies commonsense reeking with technical stupidity that it is refusing to even accept requests for transfers and upgrades.
It’s a simple matter that does not require even rudimentary technical knowledge; if a customer desires to move his line from one location to the next, ask him to clear all outstanding bills and terminate his service (the old service goes dead with the old billing system) then apply for a new service (an entirely new service is activated in the new billing system) all in one process, at this point the question of preserving the previously assigned number(s) to the customer will arise, if the customer is not mindful of retaining the old number then it’s a technical non-issue, if the customer wants to retain his existing number it is an elementary technical process of assigning that number.
The same applies to DSL service, an application for upgrade will invoke a service termination and re-application; it’s a no-brainer, the executives at GT&T prefer to hold the nation to ransom rather than do something a little novel to ensure the Guyanese public is treated with basic courtesy.
Please allow me to ask some direct questions to the Public Utilities Commission: In cases where a public utility intends to take an action (such as the one by GT&T) that will affect the service delivery to the entire country or a significant proportion of it, shouldn’t it come under the regulatory purview of the PUC? Shouldn’t GT&T be required to present a work plan to the PUC detailing how its action will affect customers, how long it will take and how they plan to compensate customers for the disruption? Shouldn’t sanctions be applied if the company does not restore the service to pre-disruption levels or improve it within a reasonable agreed timeline? Which is the statutory authority that should prevent a monopoly public utility company from holding an entire country to ransom while it endlessly fiddles with technical incompetence and dabbles in executive ineptitude?
GT&T has a historical pattern of incompetence. Allow me to go back to 2004, in West Berbice GT&T upgraded its Rosignol exchange and planted a new exchange in Bath, landline service was extended from Rosignol to No. 3 Village, while from the opposite direction lines were extended from Bath to No. 10 Village replacing the failing fixed wireless service.
This situation created a vacuum between No. 4 to No. 9 Villages, a stretch of about a mile or so. When approached, GT&T claimed that it is not technically possible to give service to the affected villages, because the lines from the two bordering exchanges have reached their maximum length – if they go any further degradation of service will result.
After protest action by villagers in front of the New Amsterdam office and several meetings with company management, GT&T indicated that the expected returns must justify the investment in new facilities to service the area, as such if it is able to garner at least 200 applications for service the necessary facilities will be installed forthwith. Well in excess of 400 applications were submitted by the villagers. That was the last anyone heard from GT&T on that matter.
I later wrote GT&T asking the company to be mindful of its corporate image and role in helping to promote racial equality, I pointed out that the villages serviced by its new line-plants are all populated almost exclusively by Indo Guyanese while the villages skipped are populated by mostly Afro-Guyanese and while it may not have been a deliberate intent, GT&T cannot overlook this fact in a country where almost all public infrastructure is denominated in racial terms since the 1960s. GT&T never replied.
I further lodged a complaint with the Ethnic Relations Commission, which to my knowledge never investigated the complaint. Discounting the ethnic factor, the choice of location for the towers in question and the approach for system upgrade reeks with tremendous technical incompetence and poor work planning. Now, nearly 10 years later, poles are currently being planted in these villages while inhabitants continue to hold their breath of expectation.
You see what I mean by ransom?
Lenno Craig

 

 

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