The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

After the carnival music has died down, our Marathon brothers and sisters are given the respect and attention they deserve, Baha Mar is finally open, and BAMSI is rebuilt, I shudder think that we will wake up one day to find out that we have been swindled and hoodwinked into believing that we finally have competition in our cell phones service.

I have been trying to see through the smoke screen and listen past the noise that I have been hearing and pay attention to what we are being led to believe is a fair and honest deal to give us reliable and decent cell service. What I see through the smoke and noise is a bunch of self-serving elitists with a dictator in the driver’s seat trying to take us down the road we really don’t want to go. All they seem to want is to keep the BTC big-wigs and their cronies sitting pretty for as long as possible while we cuss and suck our teeth at dropped calls and no signal and conch-speed data.

The so-called regulator of these things is going to “regulate” us out of a fair shake by throwing an anchor around the neck of the only real competition BTC will ever see. Cable Bahamas says they want put up their own towers but URCA says they can’t because they want to protect the environment. Since when does URCA have anything to do with that? Next thing you know they’ll be telling us where we can plant trees and what beaches we can go to.

URCA must think we all fool. You say no more towers because it’ll mess up the environment? Foolishness. How many telephone poles are there in Nassau? I would guess close to 3,000 if not more! How many on Grand Bahama? Probably just as many since they have a lot more road to cover. So we’ve got thousands of power and telephone poles all over the place, plus BTC already has 50 or 60 towers according to Mr Williams (and building more all the time – who’s stopping them?), and Cable Bahamas wants to put up their own towers so we can have even a piece of good cell service. And URCA wants to tell us that it is those next few towers that will be too much for our environment? Utter foolishness. These are the things of the modern world and we all know that that’s what it takes to get the modern conveniences we know and want.

If URCA isn’t telling BEC and Freeport Power and BTC where and when to put up their poles, what does URCA have to do with Cable doing basically the same thing? And if Cable is right in what they said last week, they already have a licence to use those towers anyway, so what’s the big deal? They say they want to give us faster and better wireless data and I say bring it.

We know the only reason you don’t want Cable to put up their own towers is because every Tom, Dick and Mary will jump off that BTC ship to something that actually works and that doesn’t cost a week’s salary just to stay online and make a couple calls. I am sure those people at URCA and their BTC friends want to make Virgin and Cable use Batelco’s towers but what will that give us? More of the same thing we have now! We don’t want more of the same. We want a new cell choice that has nothing to do with what BTC has now. Why put lipstick on that pig? It’s time to carry the pig out back and put us out of our misery.

The longer URCA can be in cahoots with BTC to save their behinds, the longer the fat cats can stay driving their nice cars and save their political careers. In my opinion, they have their hands in the BTC cookie jar but they know they’re scraping bottom!

I for one say let Cable do whatever they need to do to give us a cell service that just works. As long as they can do that, URCA needs to let them be and let us get on with our lives with the cell phone service we want, not the one they force us to keep.

HARRY B SYMONETTE

Nassau,

May 14, 2015.