The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

Cable Bahamas last night shrugged off efforts by the Bahamas Telecommunications Company’s (BTC) controlling shareholder to dismiss the potential competitive threat it poses in the mobile market, saying: “Our record speaks for itself.”

David Burrows, the BISX-listed operator’s marketing chief, told Tribune Business that its ability to make inroads into the Bahamian cellular market - should it win the second licence - could be gauged by its achievements in other communications categories.

He added that Cable Bahamas had achieved “over and above” in every business segment it operates in, with dominant 75 per cent market shares in the pay-TV and broadband Internet categories.

Mr Burrows was responding after Phil Bentley, chief executive of BTC’s controlling shareholder, Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC), effectively dismissed the threat Cable Bahamas might pose when his carrier’s mobile monopoly expires in a matter of months.

Listing the ‘different rival’ scenarios that BTC might face in a liberalised cellular market, Mr Bentley told a conference call with London-based investment analysts: “If it’s, let say, Cable Bahamas, who have applied, and they’re already the Triple Player, then on the one hand you could say well, that could be tougher for you.

“But equally, I could say they’ve [Cable Bahamas] never operated mobile in their lives, and they’re a one-country story. So, they won’t necessarily have the buying scale that’s required for investment.”

Mr Bentley and CWC also touted that BTC’s relative net product score (NPS), which measures customer satisfaction with service and network quality versus its competitors, had improved by 34 points on broadband Internet due to the faster download speeds offered to Bahamian customers.

“If you take broadband in the Bahamas, we were selling broadband over copper at 2-4 megabytes, and now we’ve started to run [a product] which is giving speeds up to 30 megabytes,” Mr Bentley said.

“We’ve also been putting broadband in some of the islands that, again, just had 2-4 megabytes over copper.”

In response, Mr Burrows told Tribune Business that the same could have been said when Cable Bahamas entered the Bahamian fixed-line voice market just over three years ago, again going head-to-head with a former BTC monopoly.

“We came into the landline market three years ago, came in very late, and now have 27 per cent of the market. That’s unheard of anywhere in the world,” Mr Burrows said.

Disclosing that no other fixed-line newcomer had managed to achieve a national market share greater than 16 per cent anywhere else in the world over the same period, Mr Burrows reiterated: “We’re at 27 per cent in less than three years. That’s after the shift to cellular was already made. You just need to look at the statistics.”

Cable Bahamas, if successful in its bid to obtain the second Bahamian cellular licence, is clearly seeking to emulate in that market what it has already achieved in fixed-line.

Mr Bentley’s “one country” remark is inaccurate, as Cable Bahamas now operates in two nations following its $100 million worth of acquisitions in Florida. It has now merged the four businesses purchased under one roof, Summit Broadband.

Meanwhile, Mr Burrows said CWC’s much-touted recent acquisition, Columbus Communications, had begun life in the Bahamas’ as Cable Bahamas’ controlling shareholder before it was bought out to make the latter 100 per cent Bahamian-owned.

“They’ve rolled out our model across the Caribbean very successfully,” Mr Burrows said of Columbus. “It’s our model. Every single package, every single service they offer, it’s a duplicate of our market.”

Tribune Business understands that apart from gaining instant entry to the fixed-line voice market, Cable Bahamas’ main objective in buying Systems Resource Group (SRG) was to acquire that business’s wireless technology - something that will be needed in a cellular network.

And Cable Bahamas remains the dominant player in the two markets - broadband Internet and pay-TV - where BTC needs to increase its market share to compensate for the loss of revenues associated with its cellular monopoly.

“In terms of proving our ability, we’ve done that over and above,” Mr Burrows said, referring to its 70 Megabyte Internet download speeds, and the 1 gigabyte speed offered to business clients.

“We have that off-island capacity for businesses that goes neck-to-neck with anything BTC has to offer.”