Last Friday, hundreds of persons across Guyana woke up to discover that their attempts to connect to the internet via dial-up resulted in repeated failures.
When contacted yesterday, GT&T Public Relations Officer Allison Parker confirmed that the company had done away with the service, which had been provided to its employees and their family and friends by extension. She said the service was not a public one and as a result there was no obligation to provide a public notice.
The company’s employees were notified in a timely manner of the development and according to Parker it was incumbent on those employees to inform others benefiting from the service.
Parker also explained that several companies and individuals bought bandwidth from the company and in turn sold the service to customers of their own. She said that in such cases, it was the responsibility of those organs and individuals to inform their customers of the latest development, since GT&T would have so informed the buyers of the bandwidth.
Although the service was pulled countrywide, in Linden, residents who lost their access without any prior notice were not very understanding about the situation yesterday. “All they said to me was that they not using dial-up no more and start introducing me to BlackBerry and telling me how I can get internet with the BlackBerry phone. I am not interested in that. It’s the principle that matters to me,” an angry resident told Stabroek News, adding that it would have been the polite and customer-friendly thing to make a public announcement of the change.
“Look, when they do it, the same time they come trying to tell people to switch from the other network and tek the BlackBerry and smarting people with thousand dollar phone,” she added.
According the resident, she and several others with whom she spoke preferred accessing internet services using their personal computers as opposed to their mobile phones. “For broadband service, deh charging something around $22,000. Where I could find that from at a time like this?” the resident questioned.
