PREPARING FOR COMPETITION

The Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago (TSTT), faced with the opening up this June of the telecommunications market and the prospect of formidable competition in the area of mobile telephones, is moving once more to cut down on its somewhat overstaffed workforce. The number of workers initially targetted in an earlier VSEP package and who accepted it, was clearly not enough, particularly in an age when the industry has become heavily computerised.

And while resistance by the Communications Workers’ Union (CWU) to its plans for a further whittling down of staff was not entirely unexpected, nevertheless, any move which can possibly hinder TSTT from becoming lean and trim cannot be considered realistic. The CWU has had a history of saying: “Not a man must go,” was one thing when TSTT held a monopoly position. This is about to change. The two mobile telephone providers accepted by many as front runners for the licences — Digicel and Cingular — are accepted international telecommunications majors.

Digicel recently acquired the wireless telephone business of AT&T, the United States telecommunications company which had been positioning itself for more than two years now to enter the Trinidad and Tobago market in the field of mobile telephones. Digicel, the mobile telephone service component of the Irish company, Mossel, has been operating, in conjunction with its Trinidad and Tobago business partner, C L Financial, for several years in Jamaica.

Digicel and C L Financial paid a reported US$47,500,000 for the Jamaica licence, one of two issued, and Digicel’s setting up of its Jamaican mobile telephone service network is said to cost some US$175,000,000. Meanwhile, on Thursday TSTT signed a two-year US$50,000,000 agreement with Nortel to expand its GSM/GPRS wireless network. Digicel and Cingular may each be required to pay something in the order of US$100 million for a cellular licence.

The companies acquiring licences from the Telecommunications Authority, undoubtedly, will go the way of today’s mobile phone service providers and be fully computerised. This will mean a minimum of staff, which will give them an advantage over TSTT in the medium term if the local telephone company does not trim its work force and its operating costs. In the real world of 2005 the CWU cannot with reason expect TSTT to do battle with computerised competition with its hands tied behind its back. As far as the public is concerned the competition can’t come too soon.