Ross Sheil and Tyrone Reid, Staff Reporters
PAULWELL
SEVERAL MAJOR overseas telecommunications providers have been blocked from sending calls to Jamaica following their failure to comply with the three-year levy imposed by Government, which came into effect at 12:01 a.m. yesterday.
Callers using British Telecom and United States' providers AT&T, MCI and Sprint were yesterday unable to reach Jamaica.
Following a meeting last night with local providers, Digicel, Cable & Wireless and MiPhone, the ministry said another major international provider, able to route calls from the U.S. and the U.K., is expected to enter the market today.
The levy charged on incoming calls is two U.S. cents per minute for calls to cellphones and three U.S. cents per minute for landlines. The revenue from the levy, expected to reach $1 billion, will be allocated by the Universal Service Fund Company Lim-ited to fund the three-year e-Learning programme commencing this year.
Phillip Paulwell, the Minister of Commerce, Science and Technology, yesterday said there would be no compromise.
Making his parliamentary sectoral budget presentation, the minister said Government would continue to monitor the industry in the coming weeks to ensure compliance from all providers. "Today (yesterday) many Jamaicans would've experienced difficulty, especially if you are trying to call from overseas into the country," he said.
He said "it is good for Jamaica and is correcting a wrong which we need now to correct."
Settlement rates, paid by international providers to local providers for each call made, were as high as 60-70 U.S. cents per minute four years ago. Mr. Paulwell said the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had disadvantaged Jamaica when it reduced the benchmark rate at 19 U.S. cents per minute.
Jamaican providers formerly earned substantial profits from the large volume of overseas originated calls terminated locally, based on the old settlement rate. When this income was cut, a 'rebalancing' process was started to recover the lost income by increasing the cost of the local service.
Mr. Paulwell said U.S. providers had failed to lower prices to their own domestic customers. The result was that incoming call traffic fell from 524 million incoming minutes to 438.9 million by 2003.
