‘NEW legislation is being developed to guide the service standards for telecommunications providers, in light of increasing complaints by customers of the island’s two telecoms players about quality of service.

The draft rules now being reviewed by the Ministry of Science, Energy and Technology are to be returned to the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) this week, portfolio Minister Fayval Williams said yesterday.

She was responding to questions at a sitting of the Standing Finance Committee of the House of Representatives, which reviewed the 2020/21 budget allocations for ministries and agencies.

The OUR had indicated that it would push for powers to quickly impose sanctions for customer service breaches in any future information and communication technology legislation.

In November, Minister Williams told Parliament that in consultations with telecommunications providers Flow and Digicel both indicated that they were “making improvements and persons should begin to see better service”. She did not outline a timeline for those improvements.

There have been increasing calls for the OUR to step in, as people have been complaining about dropped calls, poor connectivity, and unfair charges.

“The network that we have in Jamaica is inadequate and it is going to take time and it is going to require leadership from this Government, which we have begun. You will begin to see the manifestation of that kind of leadership as we go forward. I would love to be able to say that customers will no longer experience the problem, but that is not so. It’s a physical network that requires physical work to be done. Making our network more resilient is going to take time,” the minister said then.

She said it was apparent that the companies had not invested in modernising networks fast enough to keep up with the growing bandwidth demand of customers, resulting in inadequacies in the current infrastructure.

Both major telecommunications service providers, she said, were instructed to immediately provide their customers with service interruption notifications and updates on service restoration times.

According to the OUR, one provider had explained that the service issues being experienced by its customers were caused by the implementation of its modernisation programme which began two years ago. The other said it has made substantial technology/capacity upgrades to its network and that the significant increase in data traffic due to these upgrades had caused signal issues leading to service disruption.

— Alphea Saunders