Cell phone users now being billed per second

The Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company is now billing cell phone users per second rather than per minute following its recognition of the practice worldwide as well as its acquisition of the necessary equipment. Previously, if a cell phone user were to use his or her instrument to make a call lasting one minute and ten seconds s/he would be billed for two minutes.

However, as explained to Stabroek News yesterday by the company’s Marketing Director Michael George, from January 1 this year the system had been changed to one that allows for cell phone users to be billed by the second. The move, George said, would allow customers to save some of their money. “The net result is cost saving,” George said. The Marketing Director commented that when the company observed commercial practices across the industry early last year it had been recognized that billing per second was the trend worldwide. But at that time the system used by the company did not allow it to bill customers using such a regime.

Now that the company has obtained the necessary infrastructure, George said, it is able to apply the system.

The charge per minute at the off-peak rate is $29 and at the peak rate $37, exclusive of taxes. Therefore the off peak rate per second would be 48 cents and the peak rate 62 cents.

GT&T’s newest competitor Digicel, which recently acquired a licence with its purchase of Cel*Star to operate a cellular service in Guyana, is still in transition according to a member of the company’s public relations department, therefore no one was available to comment on the company’s intended billing system. However, contact with another source at the company revealed that Digicel applies the billing per second system in all the territories it operates in throughout the Caribbean. Checks on the Digicel Jamaica website confirm that customers have access to a billing per second facility provided by the company.