Peter Espeut MY RELATIVES, when they visit, cannot understand why it is so expensive to be on the Internet. Where they come from, their Internet charges are a low flat rate, and they pay a flat rate for local telephone calls. They can afford to log on to the Internet and leave it on all day for the same prices as a quick one-minute e-mail download. Indeed, I have visited a Toronto office where they listen to 'Perkins on Line' all day! They consider us backward.
And backward we are! Why is it that rich countries are on a flat rate system, and in poor Jamaica, local telephone calls are metered, minute by minute? This is a so-called 'business decision', a short-term money-making tactic of a private company rather than a strategy to promote national development. It is a business decision which is retarding Jamaica's economic growth, national development and the spread of information.
With a flat rate, profit is made on volume of customers, and the secret is to install as many telephones as you can. This is an incentive for a phone company to continually expand their customer base; but we have not provided that incentive to our telephone company, which was quite happy to sit tight and earn extra on metered and long-distance calls while thousands of households and businesses in rural Jamaica remain without telephone service, making them unable to 'log on' to progress.
It took the threat of an end to their monopoly for Cable and Wireless to promise to add 217,000 new telephone lines to their network within three years. How are they coming along with that? I hope if they are unable to keep their promise that there is some penalty they will be made to pay.
I remember the days when calling Stony Hill from Kingston was a long-distance call. It cost more to call Montego Bay than to call May Pen (in those copper-cable days we paid for telephone calls by the mile). When the telephone company changed its rate structure (a business decision which reduced the cost of collection) to have only two rates (one for intra-parish and one for inter-parish calls) they billed Stony Hill as if it were not in the same parish as Half-Way Tree until howls of protest rectified the situation.
For decades until that time, the residents and businesses of Stony Hill (and all rural St. Andrew) had been unnecessarily victimised with higher telephone rates, just one factor holding back their economic development. Indeed I remember when rural persons calling overseas were billed both for a long-distance call to Kingston (from where the call was routed) as well as the toll for the foreign call. This was exceedingly backward.
Why should a telephone call to any part of Jamaica be a long distance call? Why is it that some counties and cities larger than the island of Jamaica in area and/or population charge no internal long-distance rates? Jamaica is too small an island to have long- distance calls. Consider the size and population of the cities of Toronto or New York or London compared to Jamaica, or some of the counties in the USA. With satellite and microwave links, geographical distance is no longer a big factor in the cost of a telephone call. Whether you have long-distance calls within a country or not is a business decision intended to increase the bottom line of the company. I think as a contribution to the national development of Jamaica (if not to make up for past sins), Cable and Wireless should immediately abolish long-distance calls within Jamaica, and charge one flat rate per call.
Higher telephone charges are not the only way rural people are disadvantaged. High-speed Internet connections are available only in urban areas, which puts rural e-businesses at a serious disadvantage, and drives up their operating costs.
Two weeks ago, I was in Cancun, Mexico, at a regional fisheries meeting (more on that in a future column). From my hotel the 10-minute call to my wife (on her cell phone) advising her of my safe arrival and a little additional labrish cost me US$5.00. Three years ago, I made a similar call from Australia (on the other side of the planet) which cost me about the same. A call from Jamaica to Mexico or Australia would cost many times more! I could not understand then why long-distance calls from Jamaica cost so much! That is until I understood the business decision involved. Mexico, and especially Australia, decided that for their economy to grow, they must make communication with the rest of the world especially with their main trading partners easy and cheap. Jamaica has taken no such decision.
Now we are being offered same-rate calls to anywhere in the world. This is not because of the magnanimity of the phone company or Government policy, but because of the cheaper long-distance charges which will come with full deregulation in April next year. Thank God for competition! For many years we Jamaicans have been seriously disadvantaged by Cable and Wireless who have made billions off of us. They owe us a lot!
Telephone (and Internet) charges in Jamaica are too high and drive up the cost of doing information-based business in Jamaica especially in rural areas. In this global village, if our corner has higher IT costs, new e-business will not come and old business will flee to cheaper areas. Indeed, high telephone and Internet costs drive up the cost of doing all kinds of business. I cannot understand why telephone and Internet charges in Jamaica should be so much higher than our neighbours. The Government and those who want to bring good to this country need to address these problems which are holding back our e-progress.
Peter Espeut is a sociologist, and executive director of an environment and development NGO.
