BTC REBUTS ‘INACCURATE’ GUARDIAN STORY

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)