The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

THE Bahamas Telecommunications Company's (BTC) chief executive yesterday said that while the company's post-paid cellular packages were now "within the range" of its regional competitors, its pre-paid pricing was not as competitive as it could be.

BTC yesterday announced rate reductions for its post-paid packages- its third phase of so-called 'value for money offerings' - according to Geoff Houston.

"This is our third phase of value for money offerings that we are now into. We expect that as we go forward we will continue to look at the various price packages that we have. We will continue to look for ways to look for more value for all customers," he said.

Mr Houston added that BTC's post-paid packages were now more in line with its regional competitors. He explained: "We tend to benchmark ourselves with regional markets of similar GDP per capita, and we also try to use North America as a benchmark as well.

"We would never use our lower GDP per capita markets, such as Jamaica, so we look to places like Barbados, Cayman and America as an appropriate benchmark for the Bahamas. When we look at the post-paid packages we feel that they are now within the range, and it's certainly a good platform now for us to start looking at really future value as well."

Mr Houston added: "When we brought down our data prices by up to 25 per cent in December. that signalled as well we were getting very close to being competitive regionally. We think there is still a little more work to be done.

"That is all about how efficient we can become as BTC to enable us to pass those further savings on to customers. Pre-paid is another challenge we have got to get to. I don't feel that our pre-paid pricing is as competitive regionally as it could be as yet. I would expect over the coming months that we will address that." BTC currently has 47,000 post-paid customers and about 249,000 pre-paid customers.

Marlon Johnson, BTC's vice-president of brand and communications, sdded: "What we are doing, in a nutshell, is providing a tremendous amount of value to our post-paid offering. Our post-paid customers now will get 20 per cent more talk time in their package offerings, and all post-paid package holders will get a measure of free text messages.

"This is a significant improvement over the existing packages, in that with the packages as they exist today, only our two top tier post packages get any free texts. The per minutes rate would be more."

Mr Johnson said the per minute rate slash was not a promotion but a permanent rate reduction. "Even at our lowest post-paid package, our $19.99 package, the post-paid customer pays half the rate - at $0.17 cents per minute - than his pre-paid counterpart pays at $0.33 cents per minute."

Mr Houston said BTC will also now focus on completing the final transformation of its mobile network.

He added: "Even today 70 per cent of the calls on the mobile network are still being carried on the old network. In Bimini and the Berry Islands last week we deployed the new 2G network, which frees up capacity on the 4g for making Internet and data sessions. We expect to move the New Providence network to 2G for voice within the next two to three weeks. By doing that it then starts to allow us to manage the capacity and the resulting issue that brings through over congestion on the 4G network."

Mr Houston said BTC was also looking at launching a television product in the Bahamian market. He added: "We have launched television in the region in Barbados and Jamaica. We have also launched television in some of our other global markets.

"We will seek to try and deploy a TV product in the Bahamas. I would like to think we would at least get a trial of TV in this marketplace in 12 months. We are just working thorough the business case for TV. I think it will take us a little more time to work that out. We have got plenty of experience with our TV partners in the region, and we would expect to leverage that experience as we bring the TV service to the region."