Dennise Williams, Staff Reporter
YOU DON'T have to pay a landline rental on your home phone if you don't want to. The 'new' Cable & Wireless Jamaica (CWJ) has responded to consumers' intense dislike of the line rental charge and created a product that offers them a choice.
The Home Fone Prepaid product will essentially operate like the now familiar prepaid mobile cellular service through which customers simply buy credit for their landlines.
With a one-time payment of $770, which includes general consumption tax, persons can either switch their existing service (while retaining their phone number) or apply for a new prepaid landline. Once credit is added to the phone, calls can be received and made. In fact, CWJ president and chief executive officer, Rodney Davis, quipped: "You can have as little as $10 credit on the Home Fone and receive calls."
NO MONTHLY BILL
"And so, the company's proposition is this, get the service and we won't send you a monthly bill. Simply top up the phone and pay as you go."
There is a slight catch, however, as the rates of the Prepaid Home Fone will be nearly 40 per cent more than the regular postpaid landline service. That is, the prepaid fixed to fixed line cost will be $1.25 as opposed to $0.90 per minute during peak hours.
"This product exemplifies what the new CWJ is about," Mr. Davis said. "In the past, the fixed line service was not flexible. That will change."
The product, announced yesterday at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel, New Kingston, is designed to lure customers who have turned their backs on the landline in favour of mobile cellular phones.
Since the advent of Digicel five years ago, CWJ has lost 23 per cent or 75,000 landline customers. CWJ plans to roll out the prepaid service in selected areas over Kingston, St. Andrew, St. Catherine and St. James, and then offer the service islandwide by the first week in July.
