Bypassing costs the Universal Service Fund upwards of J$400 million a year, by at least one estimate, with legitimate operators claiming that their revenues are hit up to three times that figure.

The Universal Service Fund was set up by the government to ensure that the telecommunications industry contributes into a fund that helps to bring access to information technology into the sectors of society that would be hard-pressed to afford it or where it would not be viable for telecoms providers to offer their services.

Bypass operations take place when a telephone operator brings international calls into Jamaica but through illegal tampering and or routing, the call is made to appear as if it is coming from within Jamaica.

By using bypass, operators can avoid the US$0.02 per minute levy for calls to landlines imposed by the Jamaican government since 2005. According to the Telecommunications Act 200, Section 9 (d), anyone found guilty of engaging in bypass activity is liable to fines up to J$13 million and up to four years in prison. It has proven rather difficult to catch these operators red-handed and the methods of deception are getting increasingly more sophisticated. Legitimate telephone operators are now putting in place costly fraud detection systems but it is proving near impossible to be bypass proof.

Digicel, the largest cellphone network provider in Jamaica, palced the estimated loss of revenue to the Universal Service Fund at "anywhere between J$200-J$400 million per year" with the cost to the industry being closer to three times that figure.

"Yes, we are deeply concerned that this is becoming a growing problem," said the response.

Claro's director of carrier services, Robert Shaw said his firm was closely "monitoring on our own network and we are taking bypass activity very seriously".

"Bypass operators are not governed by the same set of rules as legitimate operators and exist just to make a quick buck," Shaw said. "That leads to quality issues and more often than not there are problems with call completion. This is a problem that has to be addressed quickly."

Geoff Houston, chief operating officer of Cable & Wireless which now trades in the Caribbean as LIME, said that "from a customer perspective it is an invisible operation that invariably delivers substandard call quality and connections that most customers then believe is actually coming from their main supplier such as LIME."

The result, he said, was poor call quality being blamed on legitimate telecom operators, which in turn have to spend a lot of time and resources "tracing these routes to confirm for customers why they are having such an inferior call experience".

All the major telephone companies note that the regulatory body, the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) is supportive of attempts to tackle this problem. There have been calls for operators to co-operate on intelligence issues concerning bypass activity.