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Friday, July 18, 2025

TSTT says: We can't control roaming rates

...af­ter Dig­i­cel re­moves roam­ing charges across the Caribbean

by

20131208

TSTT is ar­gu­ing that be­cause it is a T&T-based mo­bile provider, it can­not con­trol oth­er net­works in the re­gion to in­flu­ence roam­ing rates.

In a state­ment yes­ter­day, state-owned TSTT said: "Be­cause bmo­bile on­ly op­er­ates in Trinidad and To­ba­go, it does not have uni­lat­er­al con­trol of any oth­er net­work in the re­gion to im­ple­ment a non-roam­ing fee struc­ture.

Nonethe­less, through the as­so­ci­a­tion with LIME, bmo­bile ne­go­ti­at­ed sev­er­al years ago an agree­ment with LIME where­by its post-paid cus­tomers do not pay to re­ceive calls while they are in mar­kets served by LIME," the state­ment said.

In No­vem­ber LIME an­nounced plans to dra­mat­i­cal­ly cut da­ta roam­ing costs for cus­tomers trav­el­ing to the USA, but not with­in the Caribbean.

This comes as Ja­maican Min­is­ter of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy, En­er­gy and Min­ing, and pres­i­dent of the CTU, Phillip Paulwell, called for mo­bile net­works across the re­gion to fol­low Dig­i­cel's ex­am­ple and cut roam­ing rates.

On Wednes­day, at the joint meet­ing of the 27th Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil and the 16th Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence of Min­is­ters, Paulwell called for the to­tal re­moval of da­ta and voice roam­ing charges across the Caribbean.

That meet­ing was part of the CTU ICT Week in Ja­maica, from De­cem­ber 2 to 6.

TSTT said it would con­tin­ue to ne­go­ti­ate bet­ter rates with LIME for cus­tomers.

"Like­wise, when a post­paid bmo­bile cus­tomer makes calls in mar­kets served by LIME, a uni­form rate was im­ple­ment­ed that was ap­prox­i­mate to the cost of mak­ing a lo­cal call in T&T at that time. Bmo­bile con­tin­ues to ne­go­ti­ate for bet­ter rates with LIME which will re­dound in even low­er rates to its cus­tomers."

In Au­gust, Dig­i­cel an­nounced it would be ad­just­ing roam­ing rates for T&T and the Caribbean and in Oc­to­ber im­ple­ment­ed the de­ci­sion.

The coun­tries in­clud­ed are An­guil­la, An­tigua & Bar­bu­da, Aru­ba, Bar­ba­dos, Bermu­da, Bonaire, British Vir­gin Is­lands, Cay­man, Cu­ra­cao, Do­mini­ca, El Sal­vador, French Guyana, Grena­da, Guade­loupe, Haiti, Mar­tinique, Pana­ma, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lu­cia, St Vin­cent, Suri­name, T&T and Turks & Caicos.

In Oc­to­ber, Dig­i­cel told the Guardian: "The im­ple­men­ta­tion process was a seam­less one with Dig­i­cel's cus­tomers re­act­ing very pos­i­tive­ly to the move. Many of our cus­tomers trav­el for busi­ness and oth­er rea­sons and this is yet an­oth­er av­enue where they ben­e­fit from best val­ue. They can now en­joy their trips and not be mind­ful of high bills."

Across the Caribbean, the cut in rates has been fea­tured promi­nent­ly in the news.

Dig­i­cel quot­ed Ja­maica's Tech­nol­o­gy Min­is­ter as say­ing on Au­gust 7,2013, that "those roam­ing charges hin­der af­ford­able com­mu­ni­ca­tion among Caribbean peo­ple, and as we move to­ward greater re­gion­al uni­ty, we must take every op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­move the bar­ri­ers that keep us apart."

Dig­i­cel Cay­man CEO Chris Hay­man said: "So the idea of shut­ting off your phone from the net­work on­ly to have WiFi is a thing of the past, once this sys­tem rolls out and our US part­ners adopt it. Dig­i­cel is al­ways look­ing to re­spond to our cus­tomers' needs and we have been very hap­py with the de­mand for our cur­rent wire­less broad­band prod­ucts and ser­vices," he said.


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