Digicel Jamaica CEO David Hall yesterday expressed surprise at Monday's threat by its competitor, Cable & Wireless to sue the Irish investors over a series of advertisements on Sunday in which C&W's approach to marketing its service was called into question.

Hall said in a press statement that C&W was chastised for calling Digicel's subscribers, because the customers themselves had persistently complained of unsolicited calls from the competitor who wanted to woo them away from their service provider.

"We will not be bullied into silence when our customers are expressing discomfort and querying whether we had betrayed their confidentiality by publicising their phone numbers," said Hall.

In the ads that appeared in newspapers on Sunday, Hall charged that C&W had misused the customer list that Digicel had provided it, in order to facilitate termination of calls between both networks.

But the claim infuriated C&W's CEO Rodney Davis who, on Tuesday, said that the telephone numbers were in the public domain, and that the charges against it were "totally false and baseless". He threatened to sue Digicel over the allegations.

The issue over C&W's marketing tactics is the latest in a whole series of public tussle that has dogged the relationship between both companies ever since Digicel began offering cellular service in Jamaica in 2001 - breaking the monopoly that C&W held over the market.

Digicel now has over 1.3 million cellular phone customers, twice as many as C&W, and has operation in most of the Caribbean islands.

Interestingly the public squabble between both companies, ultimately over market share and customer loyalty, does not appear to spill over into the personal relationship between the two CEOs, who were seen hobnobbing at a cocktail party on Monday.

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