Dear Editor,

Mr. Ramdass’s letter captioned “GT&T should have introduced per second billing before ” (07.03.11) echoed the thoughts of all Guyanese when he said GTG&T should have instituted per second billing a long time ago. What was surprising, however, was the bungled answer by the usually efficient GT&T public relations department.

In effect the GT&T statement says that in an effort to avoid an overload of their network they made the decision to continuously overcharge customers (by rounding up charges to the next minute) as a strategy to control network usage. I will point out a few of the many flaws in this line of reasoning.

Firstly once the technology existed to apply per second billing GT&T had a moral duty to introduce per second billing. Secondly, customers should not be made to pay for GT&T’s inability or deliberate decision not to implement a network that can adequately accommodate the demands of their customers.

Thirdly If GT&T was indeed interested in providing a quality service to their customers they would have stopped adding new customers when the demand began to approach the limits of their network. Rather customers were forced to endure substandard service while GT&T overcharged their customers and overloaded the network.

Finally Mr. Editor let me say that GT&T does not have true per second billing as any part of the first minute is charged as a full minute. How important is this you ask? Well, if a customer makes 10 calls of 30 seconds each. With real per second billing he will be charged for 300 seconds or five minutes.

However if those calls are made on the Cellink Network the charge would be for 10 minutes.

Exactly double what the customer actually used!

I have a question for GT&T to test their honesty and integrity. What determined the timing of GT&T’s introduction of its pseudo per second billing?

I hope Digicel would provide significant competition to GT&T which can only be of benefit to the customers.

Yours faithfully,

Neo Anderson