Telecoms Sector likely to be liberalized next week — Vice President

Oct 03, 2020 News

Kaieteur News – Following years of broken promises and delays on the part of the former APNU+AFC regime, the PPP/C administration has revealed that GTT’s monopoly will soon expire, as the new government plans on liberalizing the telecommunications sector next week. Details of these and other pressing topics were shared by Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, doing a press conference, yesterday.

Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo

The Vice President told members of the media at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre (ACCC) that following thorough technical work, the new government is looking to liberalize the sector within a week’s time.
“We have spent the last few weeks going through this in great detail. It is a promise that we made a long time ago; both parties agreed to this and we need to get it implemented,” the VP said.
A question was posed to Jagdeo about what plan the government has is in place to clear the US $44M tax debt owed to GTT by the country. In response to this, Jagdeo stated that the tax matters would have to be discussed, but the liberalization is not dependent on that. “If that’s the case then GTT can always say that we never reached a settlement with you, and then you can never liberalize,” he asserted.
With the liberalization of the sector, Jagdeo reminded that it sets the basis for 5G networks, improvements in cell services, more competition, allowing more fibre optic cables to come in. “It sets up the basis for ICT platform and we want to create thousands of jobs,” the VP added.

Former Minister of Public Telecommunications, Catherine Hughes

Since coming to office in 2015, the former APNU+AFC government had promised to break the 30-year-old monopoly, but encountered some “sticking points”, including the fact that the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GTT) was demanding an agreement on the award of spectrum as part of a deal.Notably in 2016, Parliament had passed the Telecommunications (Amendment) Bill, intended to liberalize the sector, and all that was left was for the Former Minister of Public Telecommunications, Catherine Hughes, to sign the order to bring the law into effect. However, she failed to do so.
Then in late 2019, the former government and GTT had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) regarding the government’s planned liberalization of the telecommunications market, but there was very little word on when the liberalization would happen.
With anger at the seeming sloth of investments, like the unrolling of landlines in unserved areas by GTT and poor internet service, the delays in concluding the negotiations have been causing unease across the spectrum.
Notably, appeals to liberalize the telecoms sector date back to years, with GTT’s main competitor Digicel heavily advocating for the change. According to the Irish-owned company, the change that the people of Guyana are demanding is long overdue; after three decades locked into a telecom monopoly, Guyanese suffer from a poor choice of services, the mobile phone company said.
“The people of Guyana are tired of poor, unreliable broadband services and remote communities not being able to realise the dream of modern communications in their homes and are fed up of limited choice and not having the benefits of true competition,” Digicel had said in January of this year.
It had signaled intentions to bring a submarine fibre optic cable to Guyana once the sector has been opened to allow other players.
“Meanwhile, other operators are being held back from offering the better services, which they are ready and willing to provide. Poor broadband coverage — a shameful 90% of Guyanese still have no access to broadband services at home. Poor quality of services – even when they do have access to services, speeds are slow and unreliable,” the company said.
Digicel said that from indications, there is poor response time from GTT- any issues are resolved at a snail’s pace. Guyanese too had aired their frustration with GTT’s monopoly, resulting in over 4,000 persons signing a petition in which they called for government to get serious and formally announce the liberalization of the sector.