They have been talking about it for months, but today
Belize Telecommunications Limited finally lowered the
boom on Belizean consumers. Disguised as a tariff
rebalancing, BTL today announced a new rate
structure, which will drastically raise the cost of living


for both residential and business customers. What the
monopoly telecom has done is to essentially double
rates for line rental and local calls, while reducing
international and cellular service by approximately
twenty-five percent. The breakdown is as follows:


Line installation rises from ninety dollars to a
hundred. Phone rental climbs from two to five dollars a
month, while line maintenance for residential
customers jumps from eight dollars a month to
twenty, an increase of one hundred and fifty percent.
Business consumers are not spared, as their monthly
charge for each phone line catapults from twenty
dollars to an astronomical fifty. And that's just for
openers. Once you actually use your phone to place a
local call, the tab will now double to ten cents a
minute instead of five.


On the other side of the equation--the side BTL
prefers to emphasise--some rates will drop. Long
distance calls within the country will be reduced from
twenty-five and fifty-five cents per minute for zones
one and two, to twenty and forty cents respectively.
International calls to the U.S. fall substantially from
two seventy-five to one seventy-five per minute. But
calls to the Caribbean, Central America, Canada and
the rest of the world come down by less then ten
percent.


Cellular is another area for lower rates, with a drop in
activation and access fees, as well as per minute
charges, which will fall from seventy cents to fifty-five
during business hours and from forty to thirty during
off peak time. Those rates, however, are for standard
cellular; the more popular prepaid service goes down
by just nine cents to a still punishing ninety cents per
minute.


It is the new charges for internet service that users
will find most disappointing. While the monthly access
fee charge drops from forty dollars to twenty-four, the
previously free first eight hours will now be paid
for...and instead of the old four dollar per hour rate,
web surfers will pay ten cents a minute--the
equivalent of six dollars per hour. After twelve hours
of use, the rate drops to five cents per minute, but
that will provide savings only for the biggest internet
users. Sample calculations done by News 5 indicate
that typical twelve hours per month internet
customers will see their bill rise from fifty-six to
ninety-eight dollars monthly, while even thirty-six
hours per month users will pay one hundred and
sixty-eight dollars instead of one hundred and
fifty-two.


At this point, a number of questions arise. The first is
"why?" The answer is simple. By its own admission,
when BTL's monopoly ends at the end of next year its
most likely competition will come in the areas of
cellular and international calls, services for which
prices world-wide have been dropping like bombs over
Afghanistan. So BTL's rate cuts here are just a
pre-emptive strike to anticipate the competition. But
in the local service, where new competition is
doubtful, BTL feels free to jack up the rates as
Belizeans will have no choice but to stick with the
green giant. Thus while BTL's profits may fall on
cellular and international calls, any losses will be more
than balanced by increased revenue on the local side.


What, then, one may ask, is the problem? Don't the
increases and decreases balance out? The problem is
that with radically improved technology, Belizeans
should expect their overall communications costs to
drop, like those around the world. Under BTL's plan,
they will not only not drop, but will in fact rise. But
the worst part is that BTL's latest moves are not
meant to salvage the position of a struggling utility
earning profits of a lacklustre five, ten or fifteen
percent on revenues. Instead, they are meant to
preserve the status quo of what may be the most
consistently profitable publicly held utility in the
world; one which regularly earns profits of fifty cents
on every dollar it collects and has rewarded its
shareholders with annual dividends in excess of thirty
percent. All of this at the expense of the Belizean
consumer.


And in case any viewer is wondering where the Public
Utilities Commission is in all this mess, we are told by
P.U.C. chairman, Gilly Canton that the supposed
watchdog has been neutered by the terms of BTL's
licence granted in 1988. That licence merely requires
that BTL inform the minister of its intentions and does
not give the minister--in this case Ralph Fonseca--the
right to deny the rate changes. According to Canton,
while the relevant legislation has been amended for
the water and electricity industries, the
telecommunication laws remain untouched. "The
pieces are not yet in place," said Canton.


Meanwhile, News 5's calls to BTL have been met with
the reply that an explanatory press conference has
been called for Friday morning and any inquiries must
wait until that time. The new rates are scheduled to
come into effect on December first and there is
already talk of a grassroots boycott by consumers who
are being asked not to pay their October phone bills,
ordinarily due at the end of November.