There's a boom in exports underway in the poor tropical country of Guyana. Rather, make that X-ports, of a product the world can't seem to get enough of -- phone sex. This year, Guyana's lone telephone company could take in nearly $100 million from its burgeoning trade in specialized information services, such as telephone sex, as dialers in the United States and other countries place international calls to X-rated services in Guyana.
For example, open the current issue of the local City Paper to page 126: Of 15 ads listing international numbers to dial for live "chats" with people who simulate sex acts over the phone, eight route callers to Guyana's 592 exchange. Of six international phone sex numbers in the September issue of Washingtonian magazine, four go to Guyana.
New technology often has unforeseen consequences. But few business trends are as strange as what has resulted from the increasing ease and reliability of international calling: Phone sex has gone global.
Americans who dial up numbers for sexual talk with strangers may be reaching halfway around the world, often without realizing it. This has sent hundreds of millions of dollars flowing out of the United States and other industrial countries, experts said, and into faceless phone sex operations in places such as Guyana, the Philippines, Poland, the Netherlands Antilles islands and the tiny African country of Sao Tome. For the smaller countries these telephone services have become an important source of foreign exchange.
It's a huge business for Atlantic Tele-Network Inc., a U.S. company that bought 80 percent of Guyana's national phone company, Guyana Telephone & Telegraph, for $16.5 million in 1991.
In 1992 it began making its circuits available to those offering "adult" chat, sports scores, weather, horoscopes and other audiotext services. ATN is incorporated in Delaware but has headquarters in the Virgin Islands, where it also operates that country's phone system.
"When we bought the [Guyana] phone company, we planned to run it just like a regular old phone company," company spokesman Edwin Crouch said. Then, he said, "audiotext found us," referring to the dozens of service providers in the United States and elsewhere that look for offshore places to handle calls. "We started marketing it and treating it as a serious business."
In 1991 Guyana was receiving no audiotext calls from abroad. In 1995 it logged 102 million minutes of calling, according to ATN. That accounted for $91 million of Guyana Telephone & Telegraph's total revenue of $131 million. The figures continue to grow: The count had reached 60 million minutes of international audiotext by the first half of this year.
Estimates differ as to what proportion of international audiotext calls involve sex. The London-based International Telemedia Association, an industry trade group, said only 35 percent, while Jason Kowal of Telegeography Inc., a Washington market research firm, said the figure is more than 90 percent.
Whatever the split, Guyana now is tied with the Netherlands Antilles as the world leader in a $1.8 billion international market for all types of audiotext services, according to Telegeography. They are followed by the little-known nations of Niue in the South Pacific and Sao Tome.
The countries are playing to maximum effect an international payments system set up years ago that splits the cost of handling overseas calls. Under this system, the charges that an American pays for dialing Guyana, or any other country, are shared with that person's American long-distance company and the foreign phone company that picks up the call and routes it to the recipient.
For years, many smaller countries have set high per-minute rates for incoming international calls, in hopes of maximizing the revenue they get from abroad. Sometimes, this turns out to be counterproductive, because high rates mean that fewer people call the country.
But by setting up these chat lines, the economics change. Waves of new calls are generated into the country, placed by people who are willing to pay high per-minute charges. The country's phone company then turns around and shares a portion of that money with the operator of the sex lines.
In Guyana's case, U.S. long-distance companies pay Guyana Telephone & Telegraph 85 cents a minute for calls they send into the country, one of the highest rates in the Caribbean. The Guyana phone company, in turn, pays about 50 cents of that money to the audiotext service provider.
The story is the same elsewhere. Sao Tome, with a population of 140,000, requires that any foreign long-distance company connecting calls into the country must pay the local phone company $1.50 a minute. The country received $19.4 million in cash from U.S. long-distance carriers in 1994 this way, or 15 percent of its $133 million gross domestic product.
In Guyana, the phone company has taken steps to insulate the chat-line business from the country's population. Residents are blocked from calling any of the services, GT&T's Crouch said, and the company has a rule barring service providers from mentioning Guyana in advertisements.
Guyanese political and opinion leaders said residents are barely aware of the lucrative revenue stream that flows to the local phone company.
"There was some stir about it the year before last, but it soon blew over," said W. Henry Skerrett, editor of Kaieteur News, a weekly in the capital of Georgetown. Instead, he said, people are too concerned with deteriorating social conditions -- rampant crime, joblessness and political instability -- to worry about the phone system.
Pamadath J. Menon, chairman of Guyana's Public Utilities Commission, said his main complaint is that GT&T has not used enough of the earnings from chat services to further upgrade the country's phone system. GT&T is fighting Menon's attempts to get the company to reserve 15 percent of its revenue for this purpose.
"I'm unhappy that the large cash flows are not being reinvested for the benefit of the people of Guyana," he said. "It doesn't matter to us where the revenue comes from."
Crouch said the audiotext revenues "have helped toward the expansion of Guyana's phone system. Guyana certainly has a far better telephone system today than it did five years ago, and audiotext is a significant part."
Few Guyanese are employed as sex chatters, experts in the industry said. One reason may be that many international services promise, but do not deliver, truly live conversations.
A call to a Guyana number advertised in the City Paper connected to a six-minute recording promising "live" adult-oriented talk, only to refer the caller to a number in Niue, where a seven-minute recording ended with directions to dial a third number. The third number also was a recording. The total bill for the three calls: $71.33.
The sex line companies often are small operations that are seeking more hospitable hosts as developed countries ban the services domestically or, as in the United States, enact rules regulating them.
"The new law has moved these guys offshore," said Gordon Maxson, director of regulatory affairs for GTE Corp., which owns the phone system in the Dominican Republic, another major provider of offshore audiotext services. That country, like several in the Caribbean, uses an 809 area code, which appears to many Americans to be a domestic U.S. area code, but in fact is billed as an international call.
In the United States, providers are required to include a "preamble" stating the exact cost of a call and warning callers younger than 18 to hang up. No such rules exist abroad, but officials at ATN and GTE each say they require their service provider customers to adhere to similar rules. (The services called by The Washington Post had such warnings).
GTE's policy is to disconnect any numbers that contain offensive material if customers complain, Maxson said. "In one sense I'm pleased [with the audiotext business] because it means a lot of minutes," he said. "In another sense, we worry" about carrying unsuitable material. "A lot of people think it's all pornography, but by and large it's not."
© Copyright 1996 The Washington Post Company.