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Digicel is targeting rural areas not traditionally serviced by fixed lines in their homes. Mobile phones, an area in which Digicel dominates, have long replaced public phone booths in Jamaica.

Nicholas Richards, Gleaner Writer

Digicel said Friday that the price of its new fixed line service would be set at or around the same charges its mobile customers pay.

But it will also be rolling out a post-paid version of the same product in several weeks at half the price, the company told Sunday Business.

Digicel@Home, a pre-paid service, was launched at the Denbigh Agricultural Show in Clarendon last weekend.

The post-paid version, Digicel@-Work, will be available to both residential and business customers at $4 per minute for Digicel to Digicel calls.

The new fixed-line products pit the mobile service provider directly against main rival Cable & Wireless Jamaica (C&WJ) in a market segment the latter company has dominated for decades.

Anaemic attempt

Since liberalisation of the telecommunications sector, at least one anaemic attempt was made to burrow into the fixed-line market, by GOTEL, but the company failed to make any inroads.

Now Digicel, trailing behind C&WJ's Homefone product that allows customers to prepay their fixed line charges, is about to test the waters, saying it would first be going after market segments not traditionally serviced by C&WJ.

Digicel's pre-paid mobile sub-scribers pay $10 per minute for calls made during peak hours and $8 off-peak.

Its new fixed-line customers will pay similar rates to call home phone to home phone and home phone to mobile on Digicel's network. To call overseas is $17.75, and to Cuba $65.

Digicel to landline calls will also continue to cost $12 per minute during peak hours and $10 off-peak.

Earlier this year, C&WJ pioneered the pre-paid home phone service where potential and existing customers were offered the choice of a having a pre-paid home phone called Homefone, which operates like the pre-paid wireless service.

Compared with Digicel, C&WJ charges a local rate of $1.25 during peak hours and $0.99 during off peak, and a flat rate of $8.00 to other service providers, and $15.25 for international calls. C&WJ's post paid fixed-line calls are billed at a flat rate of 90 cents per minute, nationally.

Patria-Kaye Aarons, Digicel's communications and marketing executive, said the telecom was targeting those areas of Jamaica that never had landline service.

"You find that many persons in Jamaica live in valleys or in areas where the reception can be really bad, plus they are not be able to access landlines because of where they are located, so that's why we came up with this initiative," Aarons told Sunday Business.

She, however, refused to divulge information on the number of clients the company was targeting or how much Digicel was spending on the new technology.

"It is against our policy to disclose such vital information especially as it relates to numbers."

It was always part of Digicel's business plan to enter the fixed-line market, she added.

"And because of this, we will be doing a series of road shows in the coming weeks to promote the product especially in those communities that don't have access to landlines."