Dear Editor

Ms Georgina Abrams, who had previously challenged what she considered steep increases proposed by GT&T, returns to respond to a Company employee, Mike Jones, who had explained the need for customers to pay realistic rates if the Company is to remain viable.

Ms Abrams is sensible and honest enough to concede that "those who use goods or services must be prepared to pay the cost of having those goods or services provided to them."

She is, however, guilty of misunderstanding the situation when she says "having charged us a specific price for providing service, GT&T is now proposing to steeply increase the price of the service it is providing us."

Ms Abrams must know that GT&T is collecting at rates it is made to collect by the Public Utilities Commission. It is the P.U.C., not GT&T, which determines how much customers should pay. She must remember that, for years, the Company had complained that a monthly rental of $35 Guyana dollars was woefully uneconomic. Yet that it was what we were allowed to collect until the end of December 1997. Every reasonable person agreed it was too low. At $35 per month, obviously everyone, everywhere applied for a telephone and some customers had as many as four lines in their homes.

When, in a filing on December 31, 1997, GT&T asked the P.U.C. to allow it to charge $710 per month, the Commission, after an examination of the Company's financial statements, agreed to a rate of $500 per month, only to reduce it one month later to $250 after less than a dozen subscribers complained.

GT&T, Ms Abrams, is made to charge a specific price. But, as I said, specified by the P.U.C.

The rate of $250 per month was way below the cost of providing the service in 1998. Moreso today. Yet, Ms Abrams asks about GT&T: "Doesn't it have the economic sense to know that the more people it provides its services to the more money it is going to get?"

Simple arithmetic would show that at the rate it is made to collect, the Company loses money on every phone it installs.

Despite that simple fact, GT&T has never stopped expanding. We have been able to roll out service day after day, year after year.

We have shown we have been able to expand and modernize service and to subsidise the local rates because we enjoyed the benefits of a favourable settlement rate with U.S. international carriers. An Order from the Federal Communications Commission of the U.S. changed all that from the 1st January 2002.

It is because those benefits have been significantly reduced that GT&T has been made to ask for significant increases.

We understand the concerns about the steepness of the increases. We have, in turn, asked the P.U.C. to appreciate the enormity of the problem facing GT&T, following the drastic slashing of those settlement rates and the anticipated reduction of approximately US$3 million per month in revenues to GT&T from incoming international calls.

Inevitably, there is the call from Ms Abrams to the Government to do something concrete to end the Company's monopoly. It is calls like these that prompt a concern about GT&T being used as a political football.