Submitted by Hallam Hope – Consumer Advocate and Managing Director Caritel
A Reference Interconnection Offer (RIO) might not mean a whole lot to many people but it can have a significant impact on new services and the extent to which there is competition in communications.
LIME is at the centre of a RIO consultation and a series of documents on services such as overseas calling. Companies have to interconnect so that customers of one company may communicate with those of another, for example Digicel, TeleBarbados, LIME and Blue Communications, which is offering a competitive long distance card to make calls.
In addition, the new charges could also relate to new services, since they also involve interconnection and payments between these companies to terminate calls. Essentially, LIME is trying to get the best deal for itself while other parties want to ensure that the decisions taken by the Fair Trading Commission do not disadvantage them financially and their ability to compete and offer better rates where possible.
In March the FTC received submissions in response to LIME’s proposals from my business consultancy, CARITEL, TeleBarbados, Digicel and Blue Communications. Well, on Friday we all received what was submitted by the parties as well as the responses of LIME.
A public consultation will be held on June 19th when only these parties will have a chance to re-iterate their positions, provide any additional information on the issues raised or raise new related issues. In the case of the latter the Commission has given all parties until June 5th, a day over one week, to provide a written summary and submit to all parties.
Now if this isn’t highly unreasonable I don’t know what is.
We are expected in our case with limited resources to read all the documents, do research and respond by then. But this is how the Fair Trading Commission goes about its business while refusing to provide a lot of basic information when it is requested to do so.
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