jitdistributors.com Blog

The major players in Jamaica’s telecommunications industry have stopped competing. This spells doom for consumers as without constant innovations and aggressive attempts to conquer the market, consumers will lose their pride of place as ‘Kings’. This must be a very short-sighted approach as without price as a basis of competition between the companies, we are left with a few options, services being the main one. This is an area however where all big Jamaican companies have fell short without exception. Most customer service representatives, although trained to be pleasant, lack the requisite technical knowledge to help any but the ‘casual’ caller. This makes it very annoying after an unsuccessful attempt to get assistance to hear them say, ‘thanks for making it Digicel’ or ‘thanks for calling C & W’.

All companies offer a fairly decent range of mobile phones at affordable prices but regrettably, they offer similar calling ‘plans’ at similar prices. Take for example ‘international calls’ form mobile phones.

Miphone’s ‘Miphone International’ offers calls to any USA or Canada number or any UK landline for just J$999. This gives you 1,000 minutes of talk time.

Digicel’s ‘Unlimited International’ is not really ‘unlimited’ and offers the exact 1,000 minutes for the same J$999.

Finally, Cable & Wireless, they were offering the same 1,000 minutes for J$999.

The same situation holds true for their other calling plans for pre-paid mobile. Digicel charges $12 to call the other networks during peak hours and $8 off-peak. C & W’s bMobile charges are $10 and $8 respectively. Both companies charges $3 for sending local text messages and $6 for send international text messages and I could go on and on and on.

We have to conclude that they have all decided to ‘rip’ of the consumers. They may as well announce a ‘joint’ board of directors to set prices. It appears that they have been able to ‘agree’ on prices without meeting officially. This cannot be good for consumers. How else can they all be charging the same prices? These companies all have different overhead expenses, they all have different size client bases and they have different size infrastructure. Somehow I was hoping that Carlos Slim’s America Movil’s entrance in the Jamaican market would have made a difference other than being ‘one of the boys’ but it is early days yet. He did not become the world’s richest man just by towing the line, so I am still expecting big things from Miphone.

The competition authorities should be looking into this.