New Jamaica cell licence on offer.
T&T Guardian Reports.
Two of Jamaica’s mobile phone operators, Digicel and MiPhone, were surprisingly unperturbed by the government’s announced decision to go ahead with the sale of a fourth cellular telephone licence in the face of the decision by US mobile phone giant Cingular Wireless to relinquish the one it inherited in Jamaica when it acquired AT&T mobile telephone business earlier this year.
“We certainly believe that there is room for growth,” MiPhone’s vice-president of sales and marketing, Alex Hill, said Friday. “In the data area, we are currently running high-speed network in the greater Kingston area, offering wireless as an alternative to dial-up, and we are looking to expand islandwide by next year.”
Digicel’s commercial director Harry Smith welcomed the new competition.
According to Digicel’s commercial director, a new player in the mobile market could only be of benefit to consumers.
“A new licensee can in fact come and provide new services that are not being provided by the current operators,” Smith told Sunday Finance. “We were the first to bring competition to the sector, so we will continue to welcome competition.”
Senior officials of Cable & Wireless, the other mobile phone provider, were not immediately available for comment, a spokesman in the company’s corporate communications department said Friday afternoon.
Hill’s concern was the price any new entrant will pay for its licence, saying that it was likely to considerably lower the value of the one for which, like Digicel, it acquired for US$45 million five years ago. Each company was provided with two 15 MHZ blocks of spectrum.
The license that the government is now about to sell is essentially the one for which AT&T Wireless paid US$6 million a year ago, planning to focus on providing roaming to its existing customers in the US when travelling in the Caribbean.
When Cingular acquired AT&T Wireless late last year, the company’s outlook changed and the decision was made to sell the Caribbean operations.
In June, Digicel came to an agreement with Cingular to acquire its Caribbean assets, but did not include the Jamaican licence, which was disallowed under the agreement with the Jamaican government.
Cingular Wireless, hence, surrendered all its Jamaican spectrum and telecommunications licences “unconditionally.”
The fees paid to the government, which after legal fees and spectrum regulatory fees were deducted, totalled just under US$5 million, will not be refunded.
“The surrender of the licence has provided a new opportunity to reassign spectrum allocated for the fourth licence as well as other spectrum which remain available for further investment in that sector of the telecommunications market,” the technology minister, Phillip Paulwell, announced Thursday night.
Paulwell said he was confident that suitable investors would emerge from the auction to take advantage of the commercial opportunity which the spectrum allocations represented.
