The Eleutheran - Eleuthera News, Sport and much more from Eleuthera: BTC REBUTS ‘INACCURATE’ GUARDIAN STORY

BTC REBUTS ‘INACCURATE’ GUARDIAN STORY
================================================================================
admin on 08 September, 2010 
 
Wednesday, September 8, 2010. Nassau, Bahamas. The Bahamas Telecommunications
Company Ltd today (BTC) wishes to address the inaccurate and misleading article
published in The Nassau Guardian on Wednesday September 8, 2010, under the
banner “URCA recommends new rates for BTC”.
BTC points out that the referenced consultation document makes no such
recommendation to BTC. Instead, what the consultation document says is that in
respect to possible application of different peak and off-peak interconnection
rates for fixed line products, URCA “considers that the approach taken by BTC
to set a single rate across all times of the day/week is appropriate for its
fixed voice products. URCA would, however, review this approach if the retail
pricing structure is amended.”     So rather than recommending any new rate
structure for BTC, URCA instead agrees that the flat rate currently applied by
BTC is “appropriate” in the current environment.
Further, BTC suspects that writer of the article did not understand that this
reference in the document was specifically to BTC’s wholesale interconnection
rates for fixed line services, as opposed to  a deliberation on the retail rates
being charged to mobile customers as is suggested in the article.  The writer of
the article appeared to “cherry-pick”  bits and pieces of a section of a
document and subsequently came to a conclusion that is wholly misguided and
factually incorrect.
BTC will however respond to URCA on other elements of the consultation document
where the company feels that clarification or reassessment of the findings may
be appropriate.
To the question of retail mobile rates in the Bahamas, BTC notes that all mobile
prices are subject to regulation and oversight of URCA.  Nonetheless, the
company – on an ongoing basis - reviews its rate structure across all product
lines with a view to ensuring its appropriateness for the Bahamian marketplace.
BTC is concerned also that the article did not indicate whether the writer
attempted, in keeping with a fundamental principle of journalism, to contact BTC
or URCA for comments or perspective in the preparation of the article.  We
believe that such an engagement would have benefitted the article tremendously
and enabled a more accurate assessment to be drawn from the consultation report.
BTC is hopeful that The Nassau Guardian will rescind its article and offer an
appropriate apology.
(Press Release - BTC)