St. Vincent’s Parliament has replaced the 22-year-old Telecommunications Act with the Electronic Communications Act, which includes provisions to ensure that telecommunication providers deliver what customers pay for.
The law will also protect customers from bundling, a practice in which telecommunications companies force consumers to take one or more services in order to obtain the one that they actually want.
In presenting the bill on Friday, Minister of Information Camillo Gonsalves told Parliament that lawmakers have heard complaints from people who say they pay for a particular Internet speed, but only get that speed at certain times of the day or when they are close to their router.
Gonsalves said there is another set of complaints related to bundling, where a person who wants cable, might end up having to take the Internet, and a cellular phone also in order to get a cable connection.
“And you don’t know what you’re paying for what; you don’t know how much the cable costs, how much the broadband costs, how much the fixed line costs,” he said.
The minister said in such a situation, a customer cannot pick different services from different providers.
He said a third set of challenges is that of the telecommunications provider not responding to customers’ queries.
He said this was the case even after customers provided the information to the National Telecommunications Regulatory Commission.
“In the past, a lot of the complaints that you would get, the response that you would get from the regulator is ‘We’ll try to jawbone them; we’ll talk to them.’ But there was no provision in the act to give them the ability to resolve these matters,” Gonsalves said.
He said there were no provisions in the licenses that the telecommunications providers signed that gave the regulator the ability to threaten to rescind the license if the provider was not providing the service in accordance with the license.
“Now, you have those possibilities: to break up bundling — for various component parts to be clearly stated to people, to have a dispute resolution tribunal and to make complaints about your quality of service in a way that is designed to come give you a resolution.”
The new law prohibits anti-competitive conduct, and provides consumer protection, provisions related to roaming, and provisions related to number portability.
The law also addresses dominant market powers.
Gonsalves noted that the country has two telecommunication providers, but they do not compete in every space.
He said the government saw the previous act as outmoded.
“We waited a very, very, very long time for our brothers and sisters in the ECTEL sub-region to settle on this legislation,” he said, in presenting the bill which received bipartisan approval.
CMC/
